AI Unicorns Rely on Scraped Content, Raising Questions Around Compensation for Creators
• Generative AI startups like OpenAI are valued at over $1 billion but rely on scraping copyrighted content without consent for their AI to function
• These companies argue that non-consensually using others' content is justified to advance their technological progress
• However, the content creators who provide the raw material for the AIs do not share in any financial upside
• There is a debate around whether content creators should be compensated as the AI companies commercialize the output based on their work
• More broadly, there is a lack of media/entertainment tech unicorns compared to other sectors, despite huge valuation of AI companies relying on such content