7 ms·

Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

169 points by jenthoven 7mo ago

nakedgremlin 7mo ago
I thought this was a great write up on the current state for artists and AI engines. I'm honestly surprised by this nugget: > A free Tess subscription to use their own model for brainstorming and scaling repetitive work (roughly 1 in 4 artists took advantage of this) So based on the math I'm seeing... the 21 artists in the system, only 5 ("1 in 4") optioned to use the tool for their own productivity? That seems really low and makes me wonder what the user experience for creation feels like. I would assume if you decided to commit to this endeavor, you would want to see what derivative results will look like.
- sciencejerk 7mo ago
  Only 21 artists??
Terr_ 7mo ago
Props for a postmortem, much like scientific studies that publish negative results.
- john-radio 7mo ago
  really well written and generous with interesting details, too.
- instagib 7mo ago
  Fairly surprised they admit the project burned out an engineer enough that they quit. “One engineer who left Kapwing in fall of 2025 said that the short-lived Tess investment contributed to burnout.”
bandrami 7mo ago
As somebody who occasionally gets tiny ASCAP checks I think an ASCAP/BMI model might work for artists (and maybe even writers?) I guess this is more like SESAC, but maybe that's how this will end up working.
spudlyo 7mo ago
> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style. It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me. Poorly thought out IP laws lead to chilling-effects, DRM, stupid and unnecessary litigation, and ultimately a loss of digital freedoms. > What 325 Cold Emails to Artists Taught Us I'm surprised 1% didn't respond with "EAT HOT FLAMING DEATH SPAMMER" for sending them unsolicited commercial email. ;)
- Gigachad 7mo ago
  Trying to protect a particular style is just unworkable for obvious reasons. The only solution I can think of is requiring AI companies to license all of the content they have in their training set so artists get paid for the training rather than trying to work out which source material links to which outputs which is impossible.
  - spudlyo 7mo ago
    When I buy a book, I don't buy a license to read it, I don't sign an EULA that says I won't scan it, digitize it, or write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains. Do you want buy a license to read a book, because this is how you get there.
    - Gigachad 7mo ago
      The old rules were built on based on old capabilities and and old reality which no longer exists.
      - squidbeak 7mo ago
        This is a deceptive line of dismissal. Sound principles needs to be figured out before imposing any kind of restriction on art - "things have changed" doesn't cut it.
kennywinker 7mo ago
They took a base model, so something trained on stolen work - and then added a vaneer of non-stolen work. I too would be skeptical of their legal position.
- ocdtrekkie 7mo ago
  If anything the legal position is probably the opposite: The law is leaning towards AI training being transformative/fair use and AI generated content not getting any copyright protection at all. So something paying artists for style-rips probably was a net positive for artists, because it's very possible it will end up outright legal to have gen AI rip off artists' styles wholesale.
  - kennywinker 7mo ago
    In which case they would have zero business model.
- Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
  Cite one legal case where an AI company trained on a particular work, and the judge ruled that they quote-stole it-unquote.
  - kdheiwns 7mo ago
    Courts pretty much always rule in favor of rich corps that steal from individuals, and increasingly so. AI companies have money. Artists don't. That makes AI thievery fine, doubly so since AI corps have financially contributed to the government.
    - JAlexoid 7mo ago
      You should realize that this is happening not only in the space of images(where conglomerates aren't a thing), but also in music. Music conglomerates have money and their lawsuits will probably settle the issue.(unless they settle) That will be applied for all copyrighted works, regardless of the medium. I believe going against the big guys is the reason why the big ones don't yet have music generation LLMs.
Papazsazsa 7mo ago
The individual who figures out how to do this will be both wealthy and beloved.
- minimaxir 7mo ago
  The majority of the artist responses were "hard no" in 2024. There's no way the artist demographic such a service would appeal to would be on board with anything even tangent to AI in 2026 (even done ethically) where the professional liability far exceeds the potential revenue.
  - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
    Most artists I have spoken to don't believe it's possible to do this AI stuff ethically Maybe they're wrong but I tend to agree. Or even if it is possible to do it ethically, it still never will be done that way because there's just too much money in behaving unethically
    - JAlexoid 7mo ago
      The only problem that people see in these models is the money flows. If it all was non-profit - then no one would raise the ethical issue.
      - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
        I don't know I still think cutting artists livelihood from under them with tooling built on top of their work is unethical no matter how you cut it
        Timwi 7mo ago
        In a world where artists’ livelihood depends on their output, yeah. But that's not a force of nature. Our society is making the choice of letting them starve for not producing enough art. We need to decouple this. UBI now.
s1mon 7mo ago
This reminds me of the articles I occasionally see in the local newspaper about a restaurant that is closing down. So often it’s one that I’ve never heard of before that. To me, that’s the number one issue. If your likely customer base (or at least an audience member who reads a lot about the industry/market) hasn’t heard about your product, how are you going to have a successful business?
ptmkenny 7mo ago
I evaluated Tess.design about a year ago for an app I was building. At first I was excited because I wanted a service that compensated artists. However the number of artists was very limited and the blog post said “more will be added soon” but it had already been a year and it seemed like none had been added, not a good sign. Then I tested out the image generation itself and I was unable to come up with prompts that achieved the kind of images I wanted. My only prior experience at the time was OpenAI API. With OpenAI I usually got what I wanted on the first or second try, but with Tess, I couldn’t get a usable result even after 20 tries. So in addition to the limited number of artists, I think the quality of outputs vs. competing models was a huge factor. I needed to generate thousands of images, so I couldn’t afford to do dozens of attempts for each one. Hopefully one day there will be a service that can match the quality of OpenAI Image API and Flux but with compensation for artists.
- abustamam 7mo ago
  Yeah this just shows that ergonomics matters. I use Nano Banana and Grok Imagine to generate silly images for my friends and siblings (instead of reaction gifs I do reaction slop). The workflow is quite easy. Just plop in a prompt and usually the first image is good enough to share. Not that my standards are high anyway. Would I pay extra to ensure that the artists that these models were trained on were compensated fairly? Absolutely! Would I pay extra for that but with degraded ergonomics? Given that this is just a silly hobby, probably not, if I'm being honest. I think if that problem can be solved, and it's marketed to the correct group, a player in this space could certainly do well.
  - JAlexoid 7mo ago
    Most people can't even imagine the complexity it would require to actually build a system that correctly tracks down the sources for image generation. Not to mention that each image is generated from literally every single training image in a very small percentage. It's not hard when someone inputs "create in style of studio ghibli" to say that studio Ghibli should get a cut. It's very different when you don't specify the source for the origin style. And if you tried to identify the source material owner, the percentage of the output image that their work contributed to would be extremely - if not infinitely - small. You'd get minuscule payouts.
devonkelley 7mo ago
[dead]
- croes 7mo ago
  Or those 75% don’t want to work with that kind of tools no matter the compensation
throwaway314155 7mo ago
This article is bullshit. You can't get a full model from training on just one artist's work. A pretrained model is required. The pretrained model was likely one which was indeed trained on the works of others without consent. What's more, their reasoning for abandoning the company was to build out another company with a suspiciously similar idea...
ipaddr 7mo ago
They failed because they gave advances that were never going to be paid back and expected artists to bring in customers. The demand to produce something in an artists style is low. The volume required to make it interesting to artist isn't present. AI adoption and pushed back is greatest with artists you would be better off asking for money to shutdown AI. The tech itself sounds interesting and would love that writeup.
- jowsie 7mo ago
  The tech doesn't sound that interesting at all. Every AI Degen thread on 4chan and similar has included model fine tuning instructions for a few years now, for the express purpose of cloning an existing artists style. I also find it interesting that they included a quote from an artist pointing out the hypocrisy of using an existing model, trained on unlicensed material, but never actually discussed that particular issue in the article.
  - fennecfoxy 7mo ago
    I think you mean LORAs more than a fine tune. Yes, plus there are plenty of online resources to train a LORA as well, CivitAI you can just give it a bunch of images + labels and it just does it for you, the bar is pretty low.
Hansenq 7mo ago
I love this writeup--it's one of the refreshing looks into how startup innovation happens on-the-ground. We're inundated with new products and startups so often that it's easy to forget that the people working on the product are taking a bet with no promise of future payoff. In this case, it didn't work out, despite the team putting in their hard work, sweat, and clearly lots of stress. Startups are not for the weak but the process detailed here is how we've gotten some of the most transformative and innovative products in technology. Props on attempting this unique idea; very sad that it didn't work out, but sometimes the market just can't support certain ideas!
petterroea 7mo ago
> The timing wasn’t right. We depended on artists helping us to promote the platform, and they didn’t. There's a certain arrogance to believing the timing "simply wasn't right". It looks really bad if you try it with any recent controversy: * "The timing wasn't right to charge people for heated car seats" * "The timing wasn't right to make Photoshop a subscription service" * "The timing wasn't right to increase fees" It's a way of talking yourself away from the fact that what you are making may, inherently, be disliked. The cited survey even seems to have been read as favourably as possible: > Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style. This doesn't mean people want artists style to be generated by AI. It could mean they think it's horrible, but if it happens they should at least be compensated for it. In fact, the quotes survey even says 43% believe companies should ban copying artists styles. I could make the exact opposite argument with the same data: "Many consumers believe companies should ban copying styles, and this may be a more common opinion than measured as most people have no experience with modern AI tools and therefore no chance to have made an opinion yet. What is known is that the majority believe that if artists were to be copied, they should at least be compensated" edit: formatting, typo
- codemog 7mo ago
  It’s not arrogant to be firm in your beliefs. You’re not arrogant for believing the timing is never right. You may even be 100% right, but you don’t have to belittle or put down the other side. In this case, they already lost, what more do you want?
  - petterroea 7mo ago
    How is it not arrogant to be firm in your belief, even if signals say otherwise? If I believe it is OK not to shower, and everyone around me complains about it, is it not arrogant of me to ignore the signals because "they just don't understand yet"? I think a much more useful question is whether some arrogance is necessary to succeed. I personally think it is. But we are discussing a post mortem here, and the author is (in my opinion) clearly beating around the bush and using "the time wasn't right" to hide what may be uncomfortable truths. Is a post mortem valuable if it doesn't address these face first? I am not the one with all the answers here, but what I am used to in mature tech teams is that the uncomfortable parts are usually the most important in any post mortem. There are plenty of stories about companies that failed because the timing was wrong, and then see another company succeed in their place later on. That doesn't mean failure simply means "the timing was wrong" - you are putting a lot of weight on society adjusting to your belief. Consider that venture capital often invests in hundreds of founders like this, betting that at least one of them wasn't wrong. That's not statistically in your favor. It is OK (in fact it is valuable) to fail and conclude that your signals may have been wrong. There's a reason some venture capital funds prefer investing in people who have failed before.
herrfinste 7mo ago
> One engineer who left Kapwing in fall of 2025 said that the short-lived Tess investment contributed to burnout. Don’t take this personally. Even if you told this person to work constantly and they believed in you and the business, it’s not totally your fault that they burned out. I say this as someone that has burned out twice, is currently burned out, and blames those that I currently and formerly worked for. I know the problem is as much me as them. Yes, employers have a responsibility to their employees not to burn them out. But, if they do, even if the employer is in a power position where the employee felt they had no other choice, and I felt that both times, the employee can choose not to work that much or care that much for almost whatever that means- if you’re literally holding a gun it’s different of course. I know of a developer that committed suicide and the toll that took on the employer. But the employer can’t take on all of that themselves. I’m sorry that your business failed, but I hope that something good comes out of this. Also- I’m not saying that any part of your responsibility in burning out this person was ok. Just that not all of it is your fault.
- jplusequalt 7mo ago
  >Don’t take this personally. No, they should take it personally. Leadership is 9/10 times the culprit.
hendry 7mo ago
Are there successful non-AI artist platforms for works of art?
shevy-java 7mo ago
I don't understand why we should pay for AI.
- JAlexoid 7mo ago
  Currently it's mostly to pay for running and training the models.
- dragonwriter 7mo ago
  Is that because you don't believe we should use AI, or because you do not agree with “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”
supermatt 7mo ago
> …every image was traceable to a single consenting artist > …fine-tune a Stable Diffusion base model. So your entire business proposition was a lie, as you literally used a base model trained on billions of images by other artists too!
tcbrah 7mo ago
the spotify comparison is telling because spotify succeeded by being better than piracy, not by being more ethical. tess was trying to compete on ethics against tools that were just flat out better at the actual job. i generate hundreds of images weekly for video content and the honest truth is i never think "i want this specific artist's style." i think "i need a documentary still that looks like 1970s film grain" or "i need a character that matches my last 50 frames." consistency and speed matter way more than provenance. the few times i tried artist-specific fine tunes the quality was noticeably worse than just prompting a good base model well. the 6.5% artist signup rate buried in there is actually the real story. they cold emailed 325 high end editorial artists and got 21. those artists didn't want passive income from AI - they wanted AI to not exist in their market at all. paying someone royalties to automate away their livelihood is a weird value prop no matter how you frame it.
kingkawn 7mo ago
How about that few want one artist’s particular style reproduced, instead they want what they are vaguely seeing in their head produced from a cacophony of styles
rambambram 7mo ago
I'm not a native English speaker, but since when became 'lessons' a 'learnings'?
- defrost 7mo ago
  As a native (Commonwaelth) english speaker of six decades+ .. it only really "appeared" in frequency during the past decade, more heavily in the past five years or so, in central north American settings. Grammerly will tell us: Despite being more popular than “lessons” in the corporate setting, “learnings” is still incorrect. It's an erroneous plural form of the colloquial term “learning.” ~ https://grammarist.com/usage/learnings/ https://grammarist.com/usage/learnings/ As a business-speak buzz-word it might fade, or it may end up with a greater global footprint outside of the Biz-speak Babel tower.
- billyjobob 7mo ago
  Probably due to the movie "Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan". People missed the joke that it was poor English on purpose.
fennecfoxy 7mo ago
I mean there's no point; everyone still gets super mad even in the cases where models where trained only on content that a company owns or has paid for. I wish artists would stop with the "it stole our work bullshit" and just be more honest about the "it can do what we do and we're terrified and scare for our future" part. Because that I can 100% understand, and contrary to previous jobs just disappearing, we do live in "the future" and things like UBI or free cross-training should be available for this sort of thing.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
Yizahi 7mo ago
I wonder, did they pay for the artists whose art they took without paying or asking to train that LLM model they are promoting? I guess we know the answer :)
- squeefers 7mo ago
  [dead]
nickcoffee 7mo ago
The supply side problem is what killed this. Asking artists to opt in to something that most of their peers openly oppose is a brutal cold outreach problem before you even get to the product. 1 in 4 artists using the free tier for their own work is actually the most telling stat in here. If the people being compensated don't want to use it themselves, the ethical framing alone isn't enough to drive adoption. Props for the postmortem.

169 points by jenthoven 7mo ago

I thought this was a great write up on the current state for artists and AI engines. I'm honestly surprised by this nugget: > A free Tess subscription to use their own model for brainstorming and scaling repetitive work (roughly 1 in 4 artists took advantage of this) So based on the math I'm seeing... the 21 artists in the system, only 5 ("1 in 4") optioned to use the tool for their own productivity? That seems really low and makes me wonder what the user experience for creation feels like. I would assume if you decided to commit to this endeavor, you would want to see what derivative results will look like.

sciencejerk 7mo ago
Only 21 artists??

Terr_ 7mo ago

Props for a postmortem, much like scientific studies that publish negative results.

john-radio 7mo ago
really well written and generous with interesting details, too.
instagib 7mo ago
Fairly surprised they admit the project burned out an engineer enough that they quit. “One engineer who left Kapwing in fall of 2025 said that the short-lived Tess investment contributed to burnout.”

bandrami 7mo ago

As somebody who occasionally gets tiny ASCAP checks I think an ASCAP/BMI model might work for artists (and maybe even writers?) I guess this is more like SESAC, but maybe that's how this will end up working.

spudlyo 7mo ago

> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style. It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me. Poorly thought out IP laws lead to chilling-effects, DRM, stupid and unnecessary litigation, and ultimately a loss of digital freedoms. > What 325 Cold Emails to Artists Taught Us I'm surprised 1% didn't respond with "EAT HOT FLAMING DEATH SPAMMER" for sending them unsolicited commercial email. ;)

Gigachad 7mo ago
Trying to protect a particular style is just unworkable for obvious reasons. The only solution I can think of is requiring AI companies to license all of the content they have in their training set so artists get paid for the training rather than trying to work out which source material links to which outputs which is impossible.
- spudlyo 7mo ago
  When I buy a book, I don't buy a license to read it, I don't sign an EULA that says I won't scan it, digitize it, or write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains. Do you want buy a license to read a book, because this is how you get there.
  - Gigachad 7mo ago
    The old rules were built on based on old capabilities and and old reality which no longer exists.
    - squidbeak 7mo ago
      This is a deceptive line of dismissal. Sound principles needs to be figured out before imposing any kind of restriction on art - "things have changed" doesn't cut it.

kennywinker 7mo ago

They took a base model, so something trained on stolen work - and then added a vaneer of non-stolen work. I too would be skeptical of their legal position.

ocdtrekkie 7mo ago
If anything the legal position is probably the opposite: The law is leaning towards AI training being transformative/fair use and AI generated content not getting any copyright protection at all. So something paying artists for style-rips probably was a net positive for artists, because it's very possible it will end up outright legal to have gen AI rip off artists' styles wholesale.
- kennywinker 7mo ago
  In which case they would have zero business model.
Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
Cite one legal case where an AI company trained on a particular work, and the judge ruled that they quote-stole it-unquote.
- kdheiwns 7mo ago
  Courts pretty much always rule in favor of rich corps that steal from individuals, and increasingly so. AI companies have money. Artists don't. That makes AI thievery fine, doubly so since AI corps have financially contributed to the government.
  - JAlexoid 7mo ago
    You should realize that this is happening not only in the space of images(where conglomerates aren't a thing), but also in music. Music conglomerates have money and their lawsuits will probably settle the issue.(unless they settle) That will be applied for all copyrighted works, regardless of the medium. I believe going against the big guys is the reason why the big ones don't yet have music generation LLMs.

Papazsazsa 7mo ago

The individual who figures out how to do this will be both wealthy and beloved.

minimaxir 7mo ago
The majority of the artist responses were "hard no" in 2024. There's no way the artist demographic such a service would appeal to would be on board with anything even tangent to AI in 2026 (even done ethically) where the professional liability far exceeds the potential revenue.
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago
  Most artists I have spoken to don't believe it's possible to do this AI stuff ethically Maybe they're wrong but I tend to agree. Or even if it is possible to do it ethically, it still never will be done that way because there's just too much money in behaving unethically
  - JAlexoid 7mo ago
    The only problem that people see in these models is the money flows. If it all was non-profit - then no one would raise the ethical issue.
    - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
      I don't know I still think cutting artists livelihood from under them with tooling built on top of their work is unethical no matter how you cut it
      - Timwi 7mo ago
        In a world where artists’ livelihood depends on their output, yeah. But that's not a force of nature. Our society is making the choice of letting them starve for not producing enough art. We need to decouple this. UBI now.

s1mon 7mo ago

This reminds me of the articles I occasionally see in the local newspaper about a restaurant that is closing down. So often it’s one that I’ve never heard of before that. To me, that’s the number one issue. If your likely customer base (or at least an audience member who reads a lot about the industry/market) hasn’t heard about your product, how are you going to have a successful business?

ptmkenny 7mo ago

I evaluated Tess.design about a year ago for an app I was building. At first I was excited because I wanted a service that compensated artists. However the number of artists was very limited and the blog post said “more will be added soon” but it had already been a year and it seemed like none had been added, not a good sign. Then I tested out the image generation itself and I was unable to come up with prompts that achieved the kind of images I wanted. My only prior experience at the time was OpenAI API. With OpenAI I usually got what I wanted on the first or second try, but with Tess, I couldn’t get a usable result even after 20 tries. So in addition to the limited number of artists, I think the quality of outputs vs. competing models was a huge factor. I needed to generate thousands of images, so I couldn’t afford to do dozens of attempts for each one. Hopefully one day there will be a service that can match the quality of OpenAI Image API and Flux but with compensation for artists.

abustamam 7mo ago
Yeah this just shows that ergonomics matters. I use Nano Banana and Grok Imagine to generate silly images for my friends and siblings (instead of reaction gifs I do reaction slop). The workflow is quite easy. Just plop in a prompt and usually the first image is good enough to share. Not that my standards are high anyway. Would I pay extra to ensure that the artists that these models were trained on were compensated fairly? Absolutely! Would I pay extra for that but with degraded ergonomics? Given that this is just a silly hobby, probably not, if I'm being honest. I think if that problem can be solved, and it's marketed to the correct group, a player in this space could certainly do well.
- JAlexoid 7mo ago
  Most people can't even imagine the complexity it would require to actually build a system that correctly tracks down the sources for image generation. Not to mention that each image is generated from literally every single training image in a very small percentage. It's not hard when someone inputs "create in style of studio ghibli" to say that studio Ghibli should get a cut. It's very different when you don't specify the source for the origin style. And if you tried to identify the source material owner, the percentage of the output image that their work contributed to would be extremely - if not infinitely - small. You'd get minuscule payouts.

devonkelley 7mo ago

[dead]

croes 7mo ago
Or those 75% don’t want to work with that kind of tools no matter the compensation

throwaway314155 7mo ago

This article is bullshit. You can't get a full model from training on just one artist's work. A pretrained model is required. The pretrained model was likely one which was indeed trained on the works of others without consent. What's more, their reasoning for abandoning the company was to build out another company with a suspiciously similar idea...

ipaddr 7mo ago

They failed because they gave advances that were never going to be paid back and expected artists to bring in customers. The demand to produce something in an artists style is low. The volume required to make it interesting to artist isn't present. AI adoption and pushed back is greatest with artists you would be better off asking for money to shutdown AI. The tech itself sounds interesting and would love that writeup.

jowsie 7mo ago
The tech doesn't sound that interesting at all. Every AI Degen thread on 4chan and similar has included model fine tuning instructions for a few years now, for the express purpose of cloning an existing artists style. I also find it interesting that they included a quote from an artist pointing out the hypocrisy of using an existing model, trained on unlicensed material, but never actually discussed that particular issue in the article.
- fennecfoxy 7mo ago
  I think you mean LORAs more than a fine tune. Yes, plus there are plenty of online resources to train a LORA as well, CivitAI you can just give it a bunch of images + labels and it just does it for you, the bar is pretty low.

Hansenq 7mo ago

I love this writeup--it's one of the refreshing looks into how startup innovation happens on-the-ground. We're inundated with new products and startups so often that it's easy to forget that the people working on the product are taking a bet with no promise of future payoff. In this case, it didn't work out, despite the team putting in their hard work, sweat, and clearly lots of stress. Startups are not for the weak but the process detailed here is how we've gotten some of the most transformative and innovative products in technology. Props on attempting this unique idea; very sad that it didn't work out, but sometimes the market just can't support certain ideas!

petterroea 7mo ago

> The timing wasn’t right. We depended on artists helping us to promote the platform, and they didn’t. There's a certain arrogance to believing the timing "simply wasn't right". It looks really bad if you try it with any recent controversy: * "The timing wasn't right to charge people for heated car seats" * "The timing wasn't right to make Photoshop a subscription service" * "The timing wasn't right to increase fees" It's a way of talking yourself away from the fact that what you are making may, inherently, be disliked. The cited survey even seems to have been read as favourably as possible: > Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style. This doesn't mean people want artists style to be generated by AI. It could mean they think it's horrible, but if it happens they should at least be compensated for it. In fact, the quotes survey even says 43% believe companies should ban copying artists styles. I could make the exact opposite argument with the same data: "Many consumers believe companies should ban copying styles, and this may be a more common opinion than measured as most people have no experience with modern AI tools and therefore no chance to have made an opinion yet. What is known is that the majority believe that if artists were to be copied, they should at least be compensated" edit: formatting, typo

codemog 7mo ago
It’s not arrogant to be firm in your beliefs. You’re not arrogant for believing the timing is never right. You may even be 100% right, but you don’t have to belittle or put down the other side. In this case, they already lost, what more do you want?
- petterroea 7mo ago
  How is it not arrogant to be firm in your belief, even if signals say otherwise? If I believe it is OK not to shower, and everyone around me complains about it, is it not arrogant of me to ignore the signals because "they just don't understand yet"? I think a much more useful question is whether some arrogance is necessary to succeed. I personally think it is. But we are discussing a post mortem here, and the author is (in my opinion) clearly beating around the bush and using "the time wasn't right" to hide what may be uncomfortable truths. Is a post mortem valuable if it doesn't address these face first? I am not the one with all the answers here, but what I am used to in mature tech teams is that the uncomfortable parts are usually the most important in any post mortem. There are plenty of stories about companies that failed because the timing was wrong, and then see another company succeed in their place later on. That doesn't mean failure simply means "the timing was wrong" - you are putting a lot of weight on society adjusting to your belief. Consider that venture capital often invests in hundreds of founders like this, betting that at least one of them wasn't wrong. That's not statistically in your favor. It is OK (in fact it is valuable) to fail and conclude that your signals may have been wrong. There's a reason some venture capital funds prefer investing in people who have failed before.

herrfinste 7mo ago

> One engineer who left Kapwing in fall of 2025 said that the short-lived Tess investment contributed to burnout. Don’t take this personally. Even if you told this person to work constantly and they believed in you and the business, it’s not totally your fault that they burned out. I say this as someone that has burned out twice, is currently burned out, and blames those that I currently and formerly worked for. I know the problem is as much me as them. Yes, employers have a responsibility to their employees not to burn them out. But, if they do, even if the employer is in a power position where the employee felt they had no other choice, and I felt that both times, the employee can choose not to work that much or care that much for almost whatever that means- if you’re literally holding a gun it’s different of course. I know of a developer that committed suicide and the toll that took on the employer. But the employer can’t take on all of that themselves. I’m sorry that your business failed, but I hope that something good comes out of this. Also- I’m not saying that any part of your responsibility in burning out this person was ok. Just that not all of it is your fault.

jplusequalt 7mo ago
>Don’t take this personally. No, they should take it personally. Leadership is 9/10 times the culprit.

hendry 7mo ago

Are there successful non-AI artist platforms for works of art?

shevy-java 7mo ago

I don't understand why we should pay for AI.

JAlexoid 7mo ago
Currently it's mostly to pay for running and training the models.
dragonwriter 7mo ago
Is that because you don't believe we should use AI, or because you do not agree with “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”

supermatt 7mo ago

> …every image was traceable to a single consenting artist > …fine-tune a Stable Diffusion base model. So your entire business proposition was a lie, as you literally used a base model trained on billions of images by other artists too!

tcbrah 7mo ago

the spotify comparison is telling because spotify succeeded by being better than piracy, not by being more ethical. tess was trying to compete on ethics against tools that were just flat out better at the actual job. i generate hundreds of images weekly for video content and the honest truth is i never think "i want this specific artist's style." i think "i need a documentary still that looks like 1970s film grain" or "i need a character that matches my last 50 frames." consistency and speed matter way more than provenance. the few times i tried artist-specific fine tunes the quality was noticeably worse than just prompting a good base model well. the 6.5% artist signup rate buried in there is actually the real story. they cold emailed 325 high end editorial artists and got 21. those artists didn't want passive income from AI - they wanted AI to not exist in their market at all. paying someone royalties to automate away their livelihood is a weird value prop no matter how you frame it.

kingkawn 7mo ago

How about that few want one artist’s particular style reproduced, instead they want what they are vaguely seeing in their head produced from a cacophony of styles

rambambram 7mo ago

I'm not a native English speaker, but since when became 'lessons' a 'learnings'?

defrost 7mo ago
As a native (Commonwaelth) english speaker of six decades+ .. it only really "appeared" in frequency during the past decade, more heavily in the past five years or so, in central north American settings. Grammerly will tell us: Despite being more popular than “lessons” in the corporate setting, “learnings” is still incorrect. It's an erroneous plural form of the colloquial term “learning.” ~ https://grammarist.com/usage/learnings/ https://grammarist.com/usage/learnings/ As a business-speak buzz-word it might fade, or it may end up with a greater global footprint outside of the Biz-speak Babel tower.
billyjobob 7mo ago
Probably due to the movie "Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan". People missed the joke that it was poor English on purpose.

fennecfoxy 7mo ago

I mean there's no point; everyone still gets super mad even in the cases where models where trained only on content that a company owns or has paid for. I wish artists would stop with the "it stole our work bullshit" and just be more honest about the "it can do what we do and we're terrified and scare for our future" part. Because that I can 100% understand, and contrary to previous jobs just disappearing, we do live in "the future" and things like UBI or free cross-training should be available for this sort of thing.

deleted 7mo ago
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Yizahi 7mo ago

I wonder, did they pay for the artists whose art they took without paying or asking to train that LLM model they are promoting? I guess we know the answer :)

squeefers 7mo ago
[dead]

nickcoffee 7mo ago

The supply side problem is what killed this. Asking artists to opt in to something that most of their peers openly oppose is a brutal cold outreach problem before you even get to the product. 1 in 4 artists using the free tier for their own work is actually the most telling stat in here. If the people being compensated don't want to use it themselves, the ethical framing alone isn't enough to drive adoption. Props for the postmortem.