The Native Business Model For Content \ stacker news ~tech

Main takeaways:

-Content should cost money. -Content should not be reliant on subscriptions or ads to make money. -Better micropayments are the solution.

I think this applies to how AI content scraping… there needs to be a standard upfront cost of access to the information + a royalty payment any time the information is used by an end user. No idea how it gets executed though.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 23 Jan

yeah the execution is a big question mark for me too, i suspect there would need to be some new internet protocol or standard that creators integrate in order to measure/manage their payments from AI companies

607 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 22 Jan freebie

I can imagine content creators getting paid to feed AI new content, kind of like high skilled mechanical turks. I also agree that dominant forms of digital content monetization suck.

For the usual public content, that 2/3rds number can only arrive through legislation which in typical fashion will be impossible to enforce and mostly just hamstring AI and cost us all an unaccounted fortune. The same authors are probably suspicious of other AI prohibitions, so I'm not sure if they actually think this will work or they're just pumping their token bags.

Information wants to be free whether it's used to train an AI or a human. AI's should pay for good content to encourage it continue being produced but there's no reason to expect AI will behave any differently than the humans operating AI do - the incentives are mostly the same.

599 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr OP 22 Jan

what makes you think it will be impossible to enforce the rule of AI companies paying 2/3rd of their revenue to creators?

i look at something like minimum wage rules and figure if the government can pull that off (which they seem to have done with minor exceptions), they can pull this off too.

i do agree that there would be a very significant cost to legislation like this, and it will probably slow down AI innovation for years. i still think it will happen though.

607 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 22 Jan

The closest example (to what I think this is implying) is google paying webpages that it displays in search results. Doing that would be easier than what this proposes, yet to me still seems incredibly impractical.

259 sats \ 5 replies \ @jurraca 22 Jan

"AI is to content what search engines are to browsers. Money machines."

fun prompt ;) Let's examine.

search engines index content, make it discoverable, and people will pay for what they find, and like. The models open to them are subscriptions or advertising. You pay to let people advertise on your content because search engines present it to the user and can coordinate which ads show up where to maximize revenue for both the creator and the advertiser. This was the bulk of FB and Google's revenue for the last 15 years, and it's the predominant model for monetizing content. So yea, search engines are money machines for browsers.

How would AI play this role for content? People's willingness to pay for LLM outputs will be entirely dependent on the quality of the inputs to those LLMs, i.e. the content that they are trained on. For example, many LLMs out today relied on the Pile, a crawl of public text to create the "backbone" of LLM's text prediction capabilities. Clearly, content is not killed by LLMs, as many have suggested. Quite the opposite: we'll want more, better content if we ever want powerful LLMs for both specific and general use. And for that, we'll have to pay someone.

idk what this economic model would look like, but I think what will happen is that LLMs create new interfaces outside of the browser, which will need new content markets and syndication to power these interfaces. Very different content discovery and monetization world from 2000-2020.

599 sats \ 4 replies \ @kr OP 22 Jan

How would AI play this role for content?

i was brainstorming with @k00b on this exact topic this morning.

my view is that creators are becoming the largest pool of unorganized labor in the world, and resemble workers in late 19th century America.

their “bosses” are all monopolies (Google, Facebook, etc…), and creators earn very little from them with no negotiating leverage. Most creators rely on building supplementary businesses out-of-band (selling merch, tickets, affiliate deals, sponsorships, etc…).

it seems possible that AI content collection practices (whether they’re deemed legal or not) could be the topic that stimulates creators to organize their labor and negotiate with AI platforms for direct payments.

this lets creators focus on doing what they do best (creating… not selling t-shirts), and gives AI companies access to unique data.

730 sats \ 3 replies \ @jurraca 22 Jan

I directionally agree, but I think you could argue value-for-value solves your concern and enables creators to disintermediate platforms by bypassing them and going direct. The problem for creators is that the platforms are the kingmakers, and they take huge percentages. That doesn't change if they organize within the current paradigm.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @kr OP 22 Jan

i think one possible outcome is that creators form some sort of a union and only allow their content to be used for AI training if the AI companies pay them directly. v4v is unorganized labor, i think it’s incompatible with unionized work.

creators have the benefit of having nothing to lose right now, they aren’t getting paid much at all as is… and they’re getting nothing for the content that is used to train AI models.

the big assumption i’m making is that they’ll be able to effectively organize and stand up for some kind of organized labor agreement… TBD.

32 sats \ 1 reply \ @jurraca 24 Jan

I'm not sure looking at creators as "labor" is the right framing. For one, there's no labor theory of value in art. A song that takes an hour to write might make millions or might be heard by five people. The economically interesting part about "intellectual property" is that you make it once and it pays dividends forever (or at least until copyright runs out). It might be better characterized as an asset, like a car or land. imo it makes more sense to arm individual creators with their own licensing rights and build a way for them to issue contracts and negotiate their own licensing terms, instead of offloading that to a third party which then distributes via platforms. anyway thanks for thinking about this it's an important topic !

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 24 Jan

good points

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 22 Jan

imo this is the best assessment for the future of content that i’ve come across

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @grayruby 22 Jan

Lost me at Chris Dixon and web 3 sitting on the answer.

20 sats \ 4 replies \ @kr OP 22 Jan

apart from the last line in the article, was there anything you disagreed with?

254 sats \ 3 replies \ @grayruby 22 Jan

No but despite the fact that I might agree with the tenor of the article the fact that it references the ideas one of the biggest grifters in "crypto" Chris Dixon and probably the biggest grift in crypto since "world computer"- "web 3" makes me skeptical that the author approached the article with intellectual honesty and didn't try to simply create a framework for crypto narrative peddling.

I for one cannot wait to be regaled by the "tokenization" idea that shall follow.

50 sats \ 2 replies \ @kr OP 22 Jan

i do think the author is friends with Chris Dixon, so you’re right there is definitely some inherent bias in his vision.

however, in the line right before his last, he basically admits it’s still an open question of how creator payments and AI will co-exist.

i think it’s more likely that the solution involves bitcoin, and i hope bitcoiners don’t throw out the entire concept of creators being paid by AI interfaces just because one of the proponents also happens to hold investments that bitcoiners don’t believe in.

creators represent one of the fastest growing job categories, it makes sense that they are able to earn money over token equity, and bitcoiners can make it happen.

337 sats \ 1 reply \ @grayruby 22 Jan freebie

Agree. Not every idea that comes out of crypto is bad per se. You just need to take them all with a grain of salt. There are very smart people in crypto but the incentive structures are so broken that even the brightest minds and ideas get corrupted by the allure of creating seigniorage.

Nice win by Leafs last night btw. Samsonov looked back on track and D played well.

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 22 Jan

that’s fair, will be interesting to read Chris Dixon’s book once it’s out to get a deep understanding of what he actually believes and how compatible that is with Bitcoin.

Go leafs!