AI can’t exist without authors and artists. It’s time they get paid for their work | Opinion
It is time for our legislators and creators of artificial intelligence programs to recognize the property rights of those artists without whom there would be no AI.
Last month ChatGPT 4o offered a markedly improved version of its picture creation tool. Users immediately began asking it to create portraits in the style of Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation producer. Suddenly anyone’s selfie or short video could look like a product of professional animators.
The AI portraits weren’t copies. But they also weren’t original art. They were generated out of patterns of relationships between shapes and colors derived from AI models trained on the art of Ghibli and identified as such.
The genius behind AI is the conversion of art into information that is governed by the mathematical principles of information theory. AI turns art into something a computer can manipulate.
In the process, what might be directly copied from an artist’s work is lost. This is why AI supposedly doesn’t violate copyright laws. Within the AI models there is nothing left of an artist’s work to copy. The models generate their outputs on the basis of probabilistic relationships. They don’t copy; they can’t.
Yet however abstract the information in them, AI models wouldn’t be able to formulate patterns in the data without being trained on things humans create. No human artists, no information, no AI. There are no patterns for AI to detect until some human creates a work of art that encodes those patterns in language, images, and sounds.
If AI itself is to have a future, AI developers have a moral obligation to remunerate authors and artists in some way. It is through them alone that developers have access to the patterns that emerge in the AI training process. And through those artists’ names alone can the patterns be extracted. Put the artists out of business and art comes to a standstill, and so does AI art. AI is killing the goose that laid its golden egg.
If we are to preserve art and nurture artists in an AI age, we need new ethical and economic models that consider artists as the creators and gateways to information. There are existing compensation models.
Every couple of months, I get a check for a small amount of money because I own a small portion of the mineral rights to some land out in West Texas. By law, a share of the oil and gas beneath that land belongs to me.
Not that I created the oil or gas. These energy assets were made millions of years before humans walked the earth. I didn’t manufacture the wind that blows over the land, either. But I do own the places that energy companies need to drill a well to get the oil and gas and the places to build a turbine to harvest the wind. My ownership of the only point of access gives me a right to royalties from the income generated by an oil company.
I’ve done far less for the oil company that pays me for “my” oil than I’ve done for the AI companies that trained their models on my books. Yet the oil company is obliged to give me a share of its income, while the AI companies that got access to the patterns of language through my books and hundreds of thousands of other volumes give exactly nothing for what they got.
Authors, musicians, painters and artists of all types own the property that AI must have to get at the patterns in information that makes AI possible. These creators should be compensated.
Our legislators must protect the property rights of those without whom there would be no AI. Companies that produce AI must recognize their moral and ethical obligation to these same artists. If politicians could figure out a way to make sure I get a check for my mineral rights, it can’t be that hard to figure out a way that the artists get paid for their information rights.
This story was originally published April 16, 2025 at 5:28 AM.