The US DOJ advises AI companies to compensate creators

One of the biggest issues with AI is the effect on creators. Many creators around the world are having their data scraped to train AI models. This is all being done without any sort of compensation. Well, the U.S. DOJ (Department of Justice) wants AI companies to compensate creators for their data.

Ever since DALL-E hit the scene, countless artists had their work scraped to train the very AI models that threaten to make them irrelevant. This is a major problem across all industries, and the companies doing this have been getting away with it for much too long. It doesn’t help that companies like Deviant Art (you know, a company that’s supported artists’ for several years) are using artists’ data to train their models.

The DOJ wants AI companies to compensate creators

Right now, this is a large executive move performed by the government, so it will take some time to move forward. In any case, the government is one of the very few forces that can go up against the major trillion-dollar companies governing the tech industry.

Johnathan Kanter, the chief antitrust enforcer at the DOJ issued a warning to AI companies on Thursday. There are probably thousands of AI companies on the planet, but companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Amazon come to mind. “If firms in the AI ecosystem violate the antitrust laws, the antitrust division will have something to say about that,” Kanter stated.

“What incentive will tomorrow’s writers, creators, journalists, thinkers and artists have if AI has the ability to extract their ingenuity without appropriate compensation?” he continued. “The people who create and produce these inputs must be properly compensated.”

The warning didn’t mention any specific action toward the companies, and it didn’t refer to any specific action that would bring forth the DOJ’s wrath. However, the warning was mostly to let companies know that the department has this on its mind. This could be a good thing for creators in the States, so we’ll need to see where this goes.