Ed Newton-Rex, who organised the recent anti AI ingesting everyone’s work for free statement that artists of all sorts of fame levels are signing makes a good point.

There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two - sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third - training data - for free.

Big tech AI companies aren’t stingy with their money for everything. That’s one reason why they’re so unprofitable. It’s just that magic third ingredient that often attracts the $0 compensation rate.