ProRata AI plans to pay creators despite era of AI "shoplifting content," founder says

DAVOS, Switzerland – User protection is at the center of AI development for two AI company leaders who spoke with Axios in Davos.

Why it matters: Concerns about privacy and content ownership have fueled hesitations about AI for some potential users and many creators.

Axios' Ina Fried moderated conversations with Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez and IdeaLab founder and ProRata AI founder Bill Gross. The Jan. 22 conversations were sponsored by Qualcomm.

Gross founded ProRata AI in an aim to ensure creators and artists are compensated for their work in an age of generative AI.

• "I feel that AI is unbelievable, unstoppable, incredible, but also shoplifting content. I feel that it's stealing human creativity and not compensating," Gross said.
• "[G]enerative AI should share revenue with the creators as well, so I'm on a mission to try and make that happen," he added.

How it works: ProRata AI has signed up over 400 publications to a 50/50 revenue share. The process looks at the output of the generative AI content, analyzes where the outputted content came from, and then shares half of the revenue with the creators.

• The process is similar to how other systems like Spotify or YouTube compensate artists on their platforms.

Privacy is another issue of concern with generative AI. "We're really focused purely on enterprise, in particular private deployments," Gomez said of his work at Cohere.

• "We're really here to unlock prod-level use cases that deliver value. A core piece of that is delivering on privacy," he said.
• "If these models, these systems, can't access the most sensitive and valuable data in an enterprise, it can't automate work on top of it, it can't actually do the valuable part of what these enterprises want the technology to do. So we deploy completely privately," Gomez added.

Sponsored content:

In a View From the Top sponsored segment, Qualcomm president of MEA & SVP of EMEA government affairs Wassim Chourbaji said that privacy is "a big challenge" when scaling AI.

• "The way we look at AI right now is how to scale it in a sustainable way in a way that ensures security and privacy," he said.
• "But the beauty about engineering is you find solutions for those, and that's what we are working very hard to address," Chourbaji added, saying that Qualcomm is working to address this challenge by "bringing the AI as close as possible to where the data is created."