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Comment by Casteil | Hacker News Reader

In a just world, royalties would be paid to those whose content AIs were trained on.

In reality, the most we'll likely see is a few people who successfully sue for their small piece of the pie, while the big companies carry on like nothing happened - further accelerating the transfer of wealth right to the top.

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In a just world, publishers would be able to opt-out of AI training, and AI companies would have to respect this. Then, if they still want the material, they can approach publishers and buy the content. (Smaller publishers might make a "content pool" so they don't have to negotiate individually)

(This is how current search engines work, btw.. and that's why no one complains about them crawling content)

I'd go even further and say all content is by default "opted-out" from training unless explicitly allowed.

In that just world, the royalties would be pennies, just as is the case with Spotify. Creators would then endlessly complain that their content isn't worth more than it is.

It's fine if we shift to that model. The content creators won't be well compensated in that world, because their individual pieces of content are not in fact particularly valuable. It's a delusion that they are. What they really want is an artificially inflated over-compensation for their share (and if everyone got that, it wouldn't work at all).

And exactly as with Spotify, even with the payouts, the big corporation (OpenAI) will be the valuable thing in the end.

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