Source: The Verge
The Verge reports that illustrators, who've largely opposed AI model training on their work without permission, are now being directly approached by companies willing to pay for licensing agreements. This marks a shift from the earlier scrape-first model that dominated the sector. As legal liability around unauthorized training data hardens and talent becomes crucial for building commercially viable models, the economics are flipping from extraction to negotiation. The open questions are at what scale (individual licensing vs. collective agreements) and on what terms (one-time fees, royalties, veto rights) companies and artists will actually settle.