I’ve gotten kind of obsessive about something lately.

Illustration of a sad artist stuck between two rocks: "To be seen, must share work online." and "work shared online is more easily appropriated." Text says, "But for many creatives, productivity isn't the biggest challenge: it's compensation."

AI companies fed vast amounts of copyrighted work into their technology to create the AI we have today. All this creative work has provided economic value to the booming AI companies, but the creators of the original work weren’t compensated. Shouldn’t that violate copyright law? Well, I think so. But the Courts are still deciding, and the loudest voices are suggesting it was totally fine for them to do this, as if there was no other way to develop such a revolutionary technology. I don’t think that’s quite right.

When I was invited to adapt (into comics) an AI vision paper called Shaping AI this year, I noticed that the paper’s discussion of AI’s potential impact on media and entertainment had overlooked this issue. If AI is so smart, can’t it be applied to solve the problem of artists not being compensated (or even asked) when their copyrighted work was used to train AI models?

I was pleasantly surprised when the authors took my feedback and highlighted this idea as one of the milestones to focus research on and try to make possible. The illustrations in this post are my adaptation of that section of the paper.

illustration of a theatre in old times and a movie theatre showing same actor. Text says, "The advent of movies gave stage actors a new venue for their skill."

Illustration shows a venn diagram showing that acting work grew with advent of movies. Text says, "One that spread their reach, expanded their profession, and created new forms of compensation."

Illustration shows a woman in an old fashioned dress saying, "These new-fangled recording devices? Will they ruin the theatre?" The text says, "Before film, stage actors may never have imagined that this new technology would create more opportunity."

Illustration of artists drawing on a purple arrow pointing to a question mark. Text says, "How might AI provide a similarly valuable new venue for the skills of today's creators?"

Illustration shows a computer screen that shows with drawings the following: art by artist used here, so money owed to that artist." The text says, "Could dAI help to create a framework that protects and compensates the creative work.

I believe that if we decide that it is a problem worth solving, it would be possible to develop AI in a way that allows artists and writers to be compensated for this new, additional form of value that their work has, as “AI food.”

What I don’t know yet is how to make that happen.1

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