Maybe I’m optimistic but I think your comparison to big media companies paying their artist’s peanuts highlights to me that the best outcome is to let ai go wild and just… Provide some form of government support (I don’t care what form, that’s another discussion). Because in the end the more stuff we can train ai on freely the faster we automate away labour.

I think another good comparison is reparations. If you could come to me with some plan that perfectly pays out the correct amount of money to every person on earth that was impacted by slavery and other racist policies to make up what they missed out on, ids probably be fine with it. But that is such a complex (impossible, id say) task that it can’t be done, and so I end up being against reparations and instead just say “give everyone money, it might overcompensate some, but better that than under compensating others”. Why bother figuring out such a complex, costly and bureaucratic way to repay artists when we could just give everyone robust social services paid for by taxing ai products an amount equal to however much money they have removed from the work force with automation.