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Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

https://www.kapwing.com/blog/learnings-from-paying-artists-royalties-for-ai-generated-art/
65•jenthoven•2h ago

Comments

nakedgremlin•1h ago
I thought this was a great write up on the current state for artists and AI engines. I'm honestly surprised by this nugget:

> A free Tess subscription to use their own model for brainstorming and scaling repetitive work (roughly 1 in 4 artists took advantage of this)

So based on the math I'm seeing... the 21 artists in the system, only 5 ("1 in 4") optioned to use the tool for their own productivity? That seems really low and makes me wonder what the user experience for creation feels like. I would assume if you decided to commit to this endeavor, you would want to see what derivative results will look like.

Terr_•1h ago
Props for a postmortem, much like scientific studies that publish negative results.
john-radio•1h ago
really well written and generous with interesting details, too.
bandrami•1h ago
As somebody who occasionally gets tiny ASCAP checks I think an ASCAP/BMI model might work for artists (and maybe even writers?) I guess this is more like SESAC, but maybe that's how this will end up working.
spudlyo•1h ago
> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style.

It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me. Poorly thought out IP laws lead to chilling-effects, DRM, stupid and unnecessary litigation, and ultimately a loss of digital freedoms.

> What 325 Cold Emails to Artists Taught Us

I'm surprised 1% didn't respond with "EAT HOT FLAMING DEATH SPAMMER" for sending them unsolicited commercial email. ;)

Gigachad•1h ago
Trying to protect a particular style is just unworkable for obvious reasons. The only solution I can think of is requiring AI companies to license all of the content they have in their training set so artists get paid for the training rather than trying to work out which source material links to which outputs which is impossible.
spudlyo•1h ago
When I buy a book, I don't buy a license to read it, I don't sign an EULA that says I won't scan it, digitize it, or write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains. Do you want buy a license to read a book, because this is how you get there.
Gigachad•1h ago
The old rules were built on based on old capabilities and and old reality which no longer exists.
squokko•1h ago
The law has always been able to recognize a distinction between Hunter S. Thompson reading Ernest Hemingway and learning from his style and a billion GPUs reading a billion books to be able to produce it on demand. It takes time for the law to catch up to the technology but it will.
add-sub-mul-div•57m ago
Perhaps it's that the transaction for you, an individual not explicitly profiting from the work, should be treated differently than a corporation using a work solely to profit from it.
aerhardt•41m ago
In Spain books include a copyright notice explicitly prohibiting reproduction and digitalization and alluding to article 270 of the Spanish criminal code.
numpad0•46m ago
The cumulative license fees required to properly compensate all artists is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entirety of global economy if paid. The only solution I can think of is to burn down just the AI to be revisited later to be rebuilt as a tool that won't require absurd amount of training data, that also leave a lot more to its human operator beyond merely accepting literal categorical descriptions that are fundamentally tangential to artistic values of outputs.

And I think same could happen to LLM. If it took all the fossil fuel on Earth just to barely able to drive a car to a car wash, there's more things wrong with the car than in the oil price.

Retric•7m ago
> is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entire global economy if paid.

Where did you get that idea. Global economy is ~200T/year PPP. 0.1% of that split across every artist you want the training data from would be insanely difficult for the vast majority of them to turn down. Which makes sense as art isn’t that big a percentage of the global economy compared to say housing, food, medical care, infrastructure, military spending etc.

Obviously the incentive to take without compensation is far more appealing, but that doesn’t mean it was impossible to make a reasonable offer.

gedy•59m ago
Yes this is where I fear big corps leverage hate for AI into adding even more nonsense copyright rules like protecting "style" which has never been under copyright in the US at least. Not defending AI scraping and training! But this will be abused even if no AI is involved.
SpicyLemonZest•54m ago
I don't think you can infer consumer positions on IP law from positions on who ought to get paid or how much they should be paid. Many of those same consumers, and indeed many of the artists, feel that fan art of your favorite characters should be legal and unrestricted so long as nobody's making too much money off of it.
spudlyo•36m ago
You're right. It's wrong to think that all of those people are busy writing to congress demanding new laws be enacted. The problem is, the vast majority of people (while possessing a vague sense of right and wrong) do not understand how IP law works, and what the tradeoffs vis-a-vis the public good are. I'm sure many among the supposed consumers in this survey think something akin to "there ought to be a law" -- a sentiment somtimes echoed by readers of this very forum.
maplethorpe•8m ago
It's interesting you interpret the consumer's response as a desire for the expansion of IP laws. As an artist whose work exists in many of these training sets, I'm of a different opinion: IP laws can stay the same, but they should have purchased a license to use my art before including it in their training data.

Since the didn't, they should go to jail. The same way I would have gone to jail if I built Sora in my basement and sold it to the public.

visarga•3m ago
I thought it was at most a monetary fine, do people go to jail for copyright infringement? Why not go all the way to capital punishment then? /s
kennywinker•1h ago
They took a base model, so something trained on stolen work - and then added a vaneer of non-stolen work. I too would be skeptical of their legal position.
ocdtrekkie•23m ago
If anything the legal position is probably the opposite: The law is leaning towards AI training being transformative/fair use and AI generated content not getting any copyright protection at all. So something paying artists for style-rips probably was a net positive for artists, because it's very possible it will end up outright legal to have gen AI rip off artists' styles wholesale.
Kim_Bruning•15m ago
Cite one legal case where an AI company trained on a particular work, and the judge ruled that they quote-stole it-unquote.
Papazsazsa•50m ago
The individual who figures out how to do this will be both wealthy and beloved.
minimaxir•25m ago
The majority of the artist responses were "hard no" in 2024. There's no way the artist demographic such a service would appeal to would be on board with anything even tangent to AI in 2026 (even done ethically) where the professional liability far exceeds the potential revenue.
s1mon•24m ago
This reminds me of the articles I occasionally see in the local newspaper about a restaurant that is closing down. So often it’s one that I’ve never heard of before that. To me, that’s the number one issue. If your likely customer base (or at least an audience member who reads a lot about the industry/market) hasn’t heard about your product, how are you going to have a successful business?
ptmkenny•15m ago
I evaluated Tess.design about a year ago for an app I was building. At first I was excited because I wanted a service that compensated artists. However the number of artists was very limited and the blog post said “more will be added soon” but it had already been a year and it seemed like none had been added, not a good sign.

Then I tested out the image generation itself and I was unable to come up with prompts that achieved the kind of images I wanted. My only prior experience at the time was OpenAI API. With OpenAI I usually got what I wanted on the first or second try, but with Tess, I couldn’t get a usable result even after 20 tries.

So in addition to the limited number of artists, I think the quality of outputs vs. competing models was a huge factor. I needed to generate thousands of images, so I couldn’t afford to do dozens of attempts for each one.

Hopefully one day there will be a service that can match the quality of OpenAI Image API and Flux but with compensation for artists.

devonkelley•7m ago
The 1 in 4 artists actually using the model for their own work is the most interesting data point here. If you're building a royalty system and 75% of the people being paid don't even want to use the tool themselves, that tells you something about the gap between "this is fair compensation" and "this is actually useful to my creative process." The royalty model might be the right thing ethically but it doesn't solve the adoption problem.

Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

https://www.kapwing.com/blog/learnings-from-paying-artists-royalties-for-ai-generated-art/
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