Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

nakedgremlin

I thought this was a great write up on the current state for artists and AI engines. I'm honestly surprised by this nugget: > A free Tess subscription to use their own model for brainstorming and scaling repetitive work (roughly 1 in 4 artists took advantage of this) So based on the math I'm seeing... the 21 artists in the system, only 5 ("1 in 4") optioned to use the tool for their own productivity? That seems really low and makes me wonder what the user experience for creation feels like. I would assume if you decided to commit to this endeavor, you would want to see what derivative results will look like.

Terr_

Props for a postmortem, much like scientific studies that publish negative results.

bandrami

As somebody who occasionally gets tiny ASCAP checks I think an ASCAP/BMI model might work for artists (and maybe even writers?) I guess this is more like SESAC, but maybe that's how this will end up working.

spudlyo

> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style. It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me. Poorly thought out IP laws lead to chilling-effects, DRM, stupid and unnecessary litigation, and ultimately a loss of digital freedoms. > What 325 Cold Emails to Artists Taught Us I'm surprised 1% didn't respond with "EAT HOT FLAMING DEATH SPAMMER" for sending them unsolicited commercial email. ;)

kennywinker

They took a base model, so something trained on stolen work - and then added a vaneer of non-stolen work. I too would be skeptical of their legal position.

Papazsazsa

The individual who figures out how to do this will be both wealthy and beloved.

s1mon

This reminds me of the articles I occasionally see in the local newspaper about a restaurant that is closing down. So often it’s one that I’ve never heard of before that. To me, that’s the number one issue. If your likely customer base (or at least an audience member who reads a lot about the industry/market) hasn’t heard about your product, how are you going to have a successful business?

ptmkenny

I evaluated Tess.design about a year ago for an app I was building. At first I was excited because I wanted a service that compensated artists. However the number of artists was very limited and the blog post said “more will be added soon” but it had already been a year and it seemed like none had been added, not a good sign. Then I tested out the image generation itself and I was unable to come up with prompts that achieved the kind of images I wanted. My only prior experience at the time was OpenAI API. With OpenAI I usually got what I wanted on the first or second try, but with Tess, I couldn’t get a usable result even after 20 tries. So in addition to the limited number of artists, I think the quality of outputs vs. competing models was a huge factor. I needed to generate thousands of images, so I couldn’t afford to do dozens of attempts for each one. Hopefully one day there will be a service that can match the quality of OpenAI Image API and Flux but with compensation for artists.

devonkelley

The 1 in 4 artists actually using the model for their own work is the most interesting data point here. If you're building a royalty system and 75% of the people being paid don't even want to use the tool themselves, that tells you something about the gap between "this is fair compensation" and "this is actually useful to my creative process." The royalty model might be the right thing ethically but it doesn't solve the adoption problem.

throwaway314155

This article is bullshit. You can't get a full model from training on just one artist's work. A pretrained model is required. The pretrained model was likely one which was indeed trained on the works of others without consent. What's more, their reasoning for abandoning the company was to build out another company with a suspiciously similar idea...

ipaddr

They failed because they gave advances that were never going to be paid back and expected artists to bring in customers. The demand to produce something in an artists style is low. The volume required to make it interesting to artist isn't present. AI adoption and pushed back is greatest with artists you would be better off asking for money to shutdown AI. The tech itself sounds interesting and would love that writeup.

Hansenq

I love this writeup--it's one of the refreshing looks into how startup innovation happens on-the-ground. We're inundated with new products and startups so often that it's easy to forget that the people working on the product are taking a bet with no promise of future payoff. In this case, it didn't work out, despite the team putting in their hard work, sweat, and clearly lots of stress. Startups are not for the weak but the process detailed here is how we've gotten some of the most transformative and innovative products in technology. Props on attempting this unique idea; very sad that it didn't work out, but sometimes the market just can't support certain ideas!