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Comment by paul7986 | Hacker News Reader

If AI was paying for us all the content we create daily just by living, humans would love it. It would be a cyclical relationship where AI thrives off all the daily content all humans create daily and AI pays us for the privilege to thrive off of us (our content).

I saw Trump saying AI companies are discussing offering Americans stock in AI companies so that's one way where the narrative changes and a few days I thought of one way how AI can pay all of us for our content ..posted quick thoughts on my Substack... https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...

Overall, AI is irrelevant without us and it needs to pay us to keep it relevant I think! It can not continue to be a bloodsucker!

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> If AI was paying for us all the content we create daily just by living, humans would love it. It would be a cyclical relationship where AI thrives off all the daily content all humans create daily and AI pays us for the privilege to thrive off of us (our content).

I think you're on to something. Imagine OpenAI and Anthropic suddenly started funding millions of artists worldwide, basically "we pay monthly rent and food, you get to create what you want, we get rights to train on your output while you retain ownership", wonder how many would actually agree to that?

I don't think a private company could possibly swing that, but that general arrangement would be welcome as part of a copyright reform package. Like the mandatory licensing we did for song covers back when we cared more about pretending that copyright was meant to balance art and profits. You want to train on something? Fine, no need to negotiate 1,000,000,000 licenses, that would be impossible. Just check the registry for ownership and wire some cash.

And thinking about all our daily conversations that include data about businesses we patronize.. that is data / content AI can use too. Content we should be paid for alongside our pics, songs, videos and any human content we create that helps AI stay relevant!

It sounds to me like you're just describing the fact that these models are only trainable in the context of a functioning society, and are capturing that value. It's more than just the snippets of public conversation and paper trails, and it would be a problem in and of itself to try to account for what every person is owed in exchange for the marginal value they contribute. In other words, you're reinventing taxation and redistributive policies through the lenses of data proprietorship.

i saw the CEO of Cloudflare saying he thinks AI should pay us to access our content. That made me think every human should have a website they publish to and AI pays a toll to access their website/content.

And I think yes these models would die if we all went back to living off the land.

Interested to read more about this particular crossroads of copyright case law.

Also does the last sentence reflect (at least in part) what you describe (in partial jest?) in the last sentence? Iirc artists previously had to call to get permission from original owner of songs samples and I remember hearing anecdotes like Kanye promising someone he wouldn’t swear in a song with the sample of it were used (and I think most of ye’s samples constitute fair use but not sure). Anyways, you seem knowledgeable to joke about this ultra niche so thought I would ask ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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