Steve Pruneau and Asher Black discuss the bid for creators to get compensated by AI firms for teaching AI (voluntarily or otherwise). Reddit's bid for compensation from ChatGPT and Bard. Acknowledging the economic value of creative intelligence is a central concept in the #bossrebellion

Discussed:

• Reddit wants to get paid by AI
• The Monetary Value of Learning & Development
• The Intellectual Property vs. Teaching Argument
• Writers Are on Deck, Musicians Next, Visual Artists Take Note
• A New Business Model For Twitter and Facebook

Asher:

So I was reading in the New York Times that Reddit wants to get paid by ai, meaning chat, G P T, Google for Bard, et cetera. And their premise I find really interesting, which is. You are, you, we can, we can detect little tokens of information coming out in sort of chat g p t responses and, and detect that some of that information is coming from discussions that happen on our platform for which you are not paying us.

And ultimately, therefore, what's happening is they're less concerned that you're. Stealing our insights, stealing our, our community's information. They're more concerned that we are teaching you. This is an educational program for your platform. You are using our community to learn how to talk to people and what the answers ought to be.

And for an educational initiative, we like to collect a fee as your, your instructional consultant. And, uh, I, I think this is, Coming down the pike for AI in a lot of fields, but, uh, I'm enjoying the hell out of that. Oh

Steve:

yeah, I, me too. I loved it when I saw this. I thought it makes so much sense. How did we get this far down the road?

Right. It, I was thinking about nightclubs. This was solved a long time ago. You know, it's like a nightclub, only making money off of drinks and then somebody's someday. Somebody wakes up and says, uh, hang on, we're gonna put a bouncer at the door, and all you men are gonna need to pay big time. And yes, absolutely.

So now is for all you AI developers, you're gonna have to pay and pay. So, uh, yeah, I thought it was brilliant and it's gonna be fun to watch.

Asher:

Well, it's funny you should raise that analogy because, you know, so many bars and, and clubs bring in musicians, live musicians, uh, to, to create more of a draw and actually use that as the justification for the cover charge.

And sometimes these guys are, I mean, it happens a lot are paid in drinks or paid a tiny cut of the, the door take or whatever. And so, you know, basically they can just cover their gas to get from this gig to the next gig. And increasingly, a lot of bands are saying, you know, look, uh, we deserve. To get the whole doy or a separate fee on top of do we want, we want performance fee plus doy, plus the drinks, et cetera.

This is no different, really. And I, uh, like where this is going for visual artists right now. I mean, it's coming for a, as soon as you began to digitize, Music and digitize literature and digi digitize, uh, visual art through, through graphic art, et cetera, and have purely digital generation. It became natural that eventually digital would generate its own literature and music and art.

I don't think musicians realize they're next writers are on deck now. Visual artists are trying to figure out what to do, but eventually digital music generated by AI will become a thing and where's it gonna learn how to make music? It's gonna learn from musicians. So I think the visual artist right now, the discussion is not sufficiently complex because people are basically making a copyright argument, Hey, if I can detect enough similarity and I can get enough legal resources, I can go to court and argue that your work is essentially a copy of my work.

But the problem they face is that artists go into court for this all the time and somebody says, no, it's a derivative work, which is allowed under copyright law. We did modify it for our own purpose, but I think. Where the opportunity lies for artists here, if they want to benefit financially from their own creative intelligence, which is what we're really talking about.

Uh, creative intelligence versus artificial intelligence, which is a form of sort of scraping and repackaging. If you wanna benefit, maybe stop arguing that AI is copying you and start learning that ai, you are teaching AI how to do art, and you are not getting paid for that active education aside from the initial creative juices.

Wow. I hadn't

Steve:

really thought of the implications for art and music, but that makes a lot of sense. That's really insightful that. It's a derivative work. So it's a little bit of a long shot to say, Hey, you've copied my art, or I've influenced you, and I should make money from that. Well, but now I'm drifting already into the argument that you're making.

Well, if you're influencing ai, you're actually training it with, with your works, and you should get paid for that. So I love that. Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. And, and for me, it's. How do we define what should still be free and consumable? Because if you just throw your art or your music or your writing behind in the closet and lock the door and nobody can see it or, or experience it, then okay, well what's that for then?

Just your private journal so that that boundary between what should be free and what shouldn't. Uh, I'm still curious to see evolve.

Asher:

Well, this will be a real challenge for a lot of artists, I think, in the literary space. And in the, in the, in the space of music, uh, it, it's not as fraught as visual art is with, uh, a key sort of weakness, which is visual artists often sort of regard the act of selling art as somebody else's job or perpetuate a myth that if you're good enough, you'll be discovered, which happens for a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the percentage of artists and the, the whole.

Uh, thing that you just pointed out is, look, if I'm a, a fiction writer, for instance, and I don't want to get involved in reaching an audience or selling my stuff, essentially I'm keeping a journal or a diary. Well, if you're creating visual art and you aren't gonna get involved in sales or think it's dirty or think you shouldn't have to, and somebody should come for you and rescue you from that duty, effectively, your art is a hobby and not a profession.

But once you start looking at. Uh, art, generative art as, uh, benefiting from your expertise and that your expertise is partly being able to teach what you know how to do. Then we're talking about the value of education. As somebody with a learning and development degree, I have a graduate degree in, in, uh, education, and my focus is educational technology.

Uh, I have all the, the basics of a normal education degree, but with an, with an added. Uh, specialization, if you will. And so from somebody with that sort of background that develops learning systems, can build a school for a, a company or something like that, uh, our company certainly can, can take on projects like that.

And I'm one of the key practice area leaders. I. I find a challenge in our market, which is that, uh, because I, I would imagine right now if I'm a, a corporate leader, a C-suite leader right now, and I'm, I'm listening to this conversation, I'm thinking, well, well you guys, what side are you on? Are you, this is supposed to be a business conversation and you're taking the side of the creator, the producer, and I'm not the producer, and so what about me?

And I, I think this is the challenge that very much, uh, as visual artists struggle to recognize the, the economic value of the, the act of creating both in the realm of creating a product, but also in education. I think corporations often struggle to regard learning as being a fiscal value and being a fiscal commodity often.

I, I think my father once told me, you know, training is not a real career. And a lot of people in corporate education, corporate, uh, environments in enterprise environments regard training as sort of low level, not worth a lot of money, not legitimate, something we have to do. But it, it's not of of fiscal value the way some other, the things some other vendors provide or some other processes within a company are.

But once we establish that, Learning and training and development is permanent, continuous, ongoing. That, uh, learning has a fiscal value in every organization. Once we establish that the value of learning is actually fiscal, then it makes absolute sense for us to start, uh, curating and finding out, well, where do we want to derive value from the act of, of learning and training?

And, uh, then it makes sense to start thinking of a portion of that expense from a, a corporate perspective goes to, uh, all kinds of people, including people that are teaching us how to do things, uh, in the area of creative intelligence.

Steve:

Yeah. That's, that's brilliant. You know, where this conversation and also what Reddit did is making that point that there is value in training and education and, and it's really elevating it, and I don't mean it from sort of a, oh, we ought to do this.

I, I mean, from the perspective of we're overlooking all the value that's in training and education. For, for me, when I saw that, I, I immediately loved it. I tend to, to jump ahead to things like, oh, that makes so much sense. And, and maybe it won't make so much sense to everyone, but as I saw it, like, oh, Reddit just gave a business model to Twitter and Facebook.

I would be very surprised if we don't see the same thing very soon. Like all you people who wanna train your ais, you're gonna have to pay and

Asher:

pay. Oh yeah, I think you said it. You know, that, that, uh, these social media platforms and other places where again, we can detect through tokenized bits of knowledge where AI is learning ai.

What it's done is e established the value of training in a way that training human beings for whatever reason, seems to not have made abundantly clear to the American corporation.