AI Companies Are Paying Content Creators For Their Unpublished Videos

Content creators are having an unexpected boon: artificial intelligence companies are buying their unpublished videos for training purposes.

It has been a little over two years since generative AI exploded into the world but already tech companies have burned through all the “available data” on the internet.

In a bid to plug the gap and continue building AI video generators, Bloomberg reports that AI companies, including Google and OpenAI, are paying content creators for access to their unpublished videos. This content holds value precisely because it is material that never saw the light of day and is therefore unique.

Sources tell Bloomberg that these AI firms are paying between $1 and $4 per minute of footage with the price depending on the quality or format. 4K videos, for example, will go for a higher price as well as specialist imagery such as that taken from a drone.

For regular content creators posting to platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, they can expect to fetch between $1 and $2 per minute. It could be a bonus revenue stream for creators who have filmed a video but for whatever reason decided not to post it.

One social media agent tells Bloomberg that he thinks the window for selling content to AI companies won’t be open for long.

“It’s an arms race and they all need more footage,” says senior vice president of creators at Wasserman Dan Levitt. “I see a window in the next couple of years where licensing footage is lucrative for creators who are open to doing so. But I don’t think that window is going to last that long.”

There are third-party agencies that mediate between IP owners and AI companies; such as Troveo AI and Calliope Networks which negotiate terms on behalf of content creators. It could be an opportunity for photographers and videographers willing to enter into a deal.

“All the companies building video models we’re either working with or are in our pipeline right now,” says co-founder and chief executive officer of Troveo Marty Pesis, who adds his company has paid out over $5 million to creators.

These deals between AI companies and creators generally have terms forbidding AI companies from creating digital replicas of the creators themselves or making exact replicas of the content.

AI companies face a challenge to keep making bigger and better generative AI models which require huge amounts of data. The controversial practice of taking pictures, videos, and text from the internet without the copyright holders’ permission is apparently over after everything has already been taken.

During an X livestream last week, Elon Musk said the way to plug the gap is with synthetic data.

“The only way to supplement [real-world data] is with synthetic data, where the AI creates [training data],” Musk says. “With synthetic data … [AI] will sort of grade itself and go through this process of self-learning.”

However, this method is not totally proven. One study suggests that AI models trained on AI images start churning out garbage images with the lead author comparing it to species inbreeding.

“If a species inbreeds with their own offspring and doesn’t diversify their gene pool, it can lead to a collapse of the species,” says Hany Farid, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nevertheless, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all reportedly using synthetic data to train AI models with.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.