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Bill Gross His fame is As a tech star in the 1990s, he came up with a novel way for search engines to make money from advertising: under his pricing model, advertisers pay every time someone clicks on their ad. Now, the “pay-per-click” man has founded a startup called ProRata, which is developing a bold and possibly fanciful business model: AI pay-per-click.
Gross, the Pasadena, Calif., company’s CEO, speaks bluntly about the generative AI industry. “It’s theft,” he says. “They’re shoplifting the world’s knowledge and laundering it for their own profit.”
AI companies often argue that they need huge amounts of data to create their cutting-edge generative tools, and that they’re legally allowed to scrape it from the internet: website text, YouTube videos and subtitles, books stolen from pirated libraries, etc. Gross doesn’t buy that argument. “I think it’s bullshit,” he says.
Many media executives, artists, writers, musicians, and other rights holders are also fighting back, struggling to keep up with the flurry of copyright lawsuits filed against AI companies for the ways they operate that amount to theft.
But Gross believes ProRata offers a better solution than a legal battle. “To make it fair, that’s what I’m trying to do,” he said. “I don’t think this should be resolved through litigation.”
His company aims to strike revenue-sharing agreements so publishers and individuals can get compensated when AI companies use their work. Gross explains: “We can break down the output of generative AI — text, images, music, movies — into its components, figure out where they came from, and attribute a percentage to each copyright holder and pay them accordingly.” ProRata has filed a patent for the algorithm it created to assign attribution and make appropriate payments.
The company raised $25 million this week. Release The company has partnerships with a number of big names, including Universal Music Group, the Financial Times, The Atlantic and media company Axel Springer, as well as deals with authors with large followings, including Tony Robbins, Neil Postman and Scott Galloway (it has also partnered with former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci).
Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, who believes scraping the web for AI training is fair use, agrees. He told WIRED that it would be wise for people in the news industry to band together to ensure AI companies have access to “trusted, up-to-date information” that they can include in their deliverables. “I’m hopeful that ProRata will start a conversation about what an API can be,” he said. [application programming interfaces] “It caters to a variety of content,” he says.
After the company’s initial announcement, Gross said he was inundated with messages from other companies pleading for deals, including a text from Time Inc. CEO Jessica Sibley. Prorata has inked a deal with Time Inc., the publisher confirmed to WIRED. He plans to pursue deals with well-known YouTubers and other online stars.
The key word here is “plans.” The company is still in its infancy, but Gross is making bold statements. As a proof of concept, ProRata plans to release its own subscription chatbot-style search engine in October. Unlike other AI search products, ProRata’s search tool uses only licensed data; nothing is scraped using web crawlers. “Nothing is coming from Reddit,” Gross says.
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