[foobarchu]

> when you pay for an AI model you are paying for the marginal service of building a model off that data, not for the data itself

Well no, you're also paying them for having done the work to "acquire" that data. That acquisition arguably amounts to the greatest theft in history.

[chrischen]

If I understand the correctly the initial models were done by scraping the internet off public data. They now probably pay for access, especially to companies that hold the data. Even in the latter case, the content creators probably don't see anything because they signed away their rights using whatever free service they uploaded their work / comment to. In hacker news' case I'm sure some bot is scraping my prose right now and training something with it, which I'm totally fine with because the act of trying to rent seek my 0.00001 cent of value in this post is not worth the detriment to AI advancement.