Ensuring Fair Compensation for Content Creators in the Age of AI Chatbots

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses the potential impact of AI chatbots on the current ad-supported content model of the internet. It proposes a new system where chatbot vendors pay website owners for content usage, in order to ensure a fair flow of money to content creators and maintain the vibrancy of the web in the long term.

🙋 Q&A

[01] The gist of the proposed system

1. What is the core of the proposed concept?

• The core idea is a new flow of money from users to chatbot vendors, who then pay website owners for content usage.
• The user pays a monthly fee to the chatbot vendor, who then pays the website owners a sum per site visit during 'realtime search' by the chatbot.

2. What are the proposed stages of implementation?

1. Realtime search only, with manual payouts by chatbot vendors to select website owners.
2. Automation of the payment system, where website owners can specify their payment details in the robots.txt or a new robot-payments.txt file.
3. Compensation for use of website content in the chatbot's original training data, which is a more complex challenge due to the difficulty of 'source data attribution'.

3. What are the potential benefits for chatbot vendors to implement this system?

• It could improve their public perception and reduce accusations of 'stealing' content.
• It may help them differentiate their offerings and attract users if they demonstrate a commitment to compensating content creators.
• As chatbot costs decrease and profits increase, they can afford to share more revenue with creators.

[02] Potential abuse cases and considerations

1. How could site owners try to game the system?

• Nefarious site owners could try to drive excessive traffic to their site through carefully crafted chatbot prompts. This can be mitigated by limiting payouts per user per domain.
• Insiders with access to the robots.txt file could try to divert payments, which can be addressed by requiring traceable payment methods.

2. How could chatbot vendors misrepresent their payouts?

• Chatbot vendors could claim to pay more to creators than they actually do. Publicly publishing itemized payments could help prevent this.
• Third-party certification of the payment system may be needed in the future to ensure transparency.

3. What other considerations are mentioned?

• The system could open up revenue streams for platforms like Wikipedia that don't want advertising.
• Chatbot vendors may need to report publicly on their creator compensation to allow users to compare offerings.
• Different types of websites will be impacted differently, with current events sites benefiting more initially before data attribution is improved.
• The long tail of low-traffic websites is not expected to significantly affect the overall concept.