Ever since ChatGPT entered the public’s consciousness its been surrounded by controversy.

ChatGPT started off as a cute toy, but immediately became a threat after Microsoft’s $10 billion investment announcement. Sarah Silverman and other comedians sued OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringment alleging their large language models, GPT and LLaMA, inappropriately used their material for training.

This week, 8000 authors from the Authors Guild signed a petition urging OpenAI and other companies to stop using their works to train AI models. The Authors Guild says their copyrighted material (books, essays, and poems) have become, “food for AI systems and there’s no bill.” The Guild wants these companies to, “obtain consent, credit, and compensate the authors,” for their work in helping these companies profit from the resulting technologies.

By definition and design, AI technologies are derivative works. The models require large amounts of data, taken from somewhere, for training and any resulting output is based upon the training data. For all its capabilities, GPT, Bard, and LLaMA would not work without being trained on large amounts of text. These models also wouldn’t know how to write text with any particular style unless they were trained on different kinds of text. This means the models were trained on everything spanning fictional universes and non-fiction texts.

Digital Devalues Content

The Authors Guild is the latest association to battle against large corporations appropriating creative works for profit. It’s no coincedence the Guild is trying to get ahead of AI while SAG-AFTRA is battling production corporations for better pay and ownership of their digital likenesses. All creatives are pushing back against digital before corporations effectively minimize their craft into another commodity. Snoop Dogg shared his own commentary on how musicians and performers’ work is commoditized helping technology companies make billions in profits while not sharing them with the artists they profit off. To paraphrase, “a rapper can have a billion streams on YouTube, and can’t make a million dollars from those streams.”

Snoop Dogg breaks down why streaming residuals is a huge issue for SAG-AFTRA & WGA. Well said! pic.twitter.com/fBOSUOyPnV

— Todd Spence (@Todd_Spence) July 18, 2023

As social media companies and tech giants run out of eyeballs and ears to share content with, the value of any consumer of digital products is going down. This could be a good development for both consumers and creatives because it signals we’re heading towards a correction where both sides can receive value. (HBO)Max, Disney+, and others have discovered subscription streaming isn’t the cash cow they assumed it to be. We’re seeing services cutting popular shows and halting productions because they can’t make the numbers work. This means a couple of things. Consumers would have to pay more in either subscriptions or commercials to continue watching their favorite shows, producers will cease throwing any old show against the wall to see if people watch it, and creatives will get paid their due in production and residuals. This also means there’s a possibility digital content can become more valuable.

In this scenario, everyone gains more value in different ways. Consumers may pay more, but they’re not subsidizing crappy shows on a platform. Revenue goes up for streamers. Creatives making good productions make more money.

Everyone Needs to Pay More

The thing is, consumers have grown accustomed to paying nothing for digital services. Consumers actually lose because we’re presented with a buffet of mostly trash content and a few gems. Because big bucks are made at scale, streamers have little incentive to share any wealth downstream. It’s why musicians don’t paid on YouTube and creatives aren’t making any money from replays on Netflix or Hulu.

No one really wants to hear it, including myself, but we’re due for changes in our economic systems. Digital shocked the system in the 2010s and it’s finally caught up with creative professionals. Today, AI is about to rock everyone’s world. We have a choice. We can ignore the impacts of AI and digital technology on our notion of work, or we can get ahead of this and make sure lay people’s interests are being supported over a small number of rich people.