{"id":17275,"date":"2026-01-27T20:10:34","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T19:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/uncategorized\/is-it-learning-or-stealing-the-debate-over-royalties-the-future-of-culture-and-the-limits-of-automation\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T17:38:21","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T16:38:21","slug":"is-it-learning-or-stealing-the-debate-over-royalties-the-future-of-culture-and-the-limits-of-automation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/culture-and-media-2\/is-it-learning-or-stealing-the-debate-over-royalties-the-future-of-culture-and-the-limits-of-automation\/","title":{"rendered":"\ud83d\udd12 Is it learning or\u2026 stealing? The debate over royalties, the future of culture and the limits of automation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When an AI model is trained on your creative work, is it more like a fan reading your book to become a better writer, or more like a company using your recording without asking for permission?<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This comparison defines the axis of the entire debate \u2014 one that resonated strongly during Generative Revolution Day, an event designed to raise bold questions and seek the most plausible answers in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. It came to the forefront in a panel discussion titled:<mark style=\"background-color:#82D65E\" class=\"has-inline-color has-base-color\"><a href=\"https:\/\/generativerevolution.ai\/should-artists-get-royalties-from-AI-training\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> &#8220;Should artists and authors be receiving royalties for AI models training?&#8221;.<\/a><\/mark><\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, should they, or not?<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The rest of the article is below the video<\/em><\/p><figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Should artists and authors be receiving royalties for AI models training?\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-COEMu73D6A?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure><h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Having control<\/h4><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On the creators\u2019 side is Amanda Palmer\u2014the vocalist and pianist for The Dresden Dolls\u2014who has been building her independence for years outside the traditional publishing system. She was one of the first artists to show that a direct relationship with fans can be the basis of income. Her record-breaking Kickstarter campaign and activity on Patreon have made her one of the most prominent voices in the debate about artists\u2019 autonomy.<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cMy songwriting catalogue isn\u2019t being used with my permission. If my music or anything connected to it is being repurposed without my consent, that\u2019s crossing a line, and it\u2019s simply unfair&#8221; says Palmer.<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As she explains, she&#8217;s not opposed to technology. It&#8217;s about breaking the arrangement that has structured culture for decades: a relationship based on clear rules. One of them is the prohibition on using a work without the creator&#8217;s consent. It&#8217;s the creator who should have control over what happens to their work.<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;I can decide to give my work away for free. I can decide to publish it online. I can put it on Bandcamp, Spotify or YouTube. But I remain in control&#8221;, she explains.<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For her, AI violates this order not because it &#8220;learns&#8221;, but because it uses culture outside the established rules.<\/p><h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Free knowledge?<\/h4><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On the other side is Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, a project that has changed global access to knowledge. For years, Wales has argued that the open flow of information is a prerequisite for the development of education, research and democracy. In this debate, he stands by his position.<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;If you copy and distribute someone else\u2019s work, then of course copyright law comes into play. But if you\u2019re learning from some material, that doesn\u2019t violate that law&#8221;, he claims.<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For Wales, training AI models is the same as reading, analyzing and processing knowledge. In his view, this distinction is key to open-access-based activities.<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;For a project like Wikipedia, this is of fundamental importance. It wouldn&#8217;t make sense if facts were subject to copyright and if publishers claimed that Wikipedians were infringing that law by reading scholarly publications, learning from them and then describing them in their own words&#8221;.<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wales fears that overly broad legal protection won&#8217;t help creators, but will block the creation of knowledge infrastructure on which education and science rely. He adds that even proponents of broad fair use admit that current systems have weaknesses:<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;Large language models have a very serious plagiarism problem. In many cases, it wasn&#8217;t difficult to force them to reproduce entire passages of text, which is simply unacceptable&#8221;.<\/p><h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Who will create the culture of the future?<\/h4><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">According to Palmer, it&#8217;s not just about money, but about creators&#8217; visibility:<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;If we don&#8217;t set boundaries, it won&#8217;t just mean that many people will lose their jobs. It will result in a society deprived of the human voice that tells us who we are. And that is truly dangerous&#8221;.<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In this way, culture can become an anonymous backdrop, and creative work an invisible fuel for systems that draw value from it. There&#8217;s another element lurking in the background: a power imbalance. On one side are individual creators and small cultural organizations. On the other, global technology companies with capital and infrastructure. The dispute over royalties is about who has real bargaining power.<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Palmer insists she doesn&#8217;t want to stop technology. <\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;That doesn&#8217;t mean we cannot introduce laws, rules, safeguards and industry regulations that will ensure that creators are fairly compensated, recognized and genuinely included in this process&#8221;, she emphasizes.<\/p><h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A dead-end situation?<\/h4><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Not necessarily. The remarks of the Generative Revolution Day participants suggest that the dispute over training AI on other people&#8217;s creative work doesn&#8217;t have to boil down to a simple &#8220;yes or no&#8221;. Instead of blocking technological development, we can look for solutions that establish clear ground rules. <\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of these is clear attribution standards that ensure creators don\u2019t fade from the view when their work becomes part of the AI ecosystem. Another idea is opt-out mechanisms that allow artists and authors to decide whether and to what extent their work can be used. There&#8217;s also a growing concept of licensing entire cultural catalogs, rather than shifting responsibility to individual creators. Finally, some experts point out that regulations should focus primarily on what models produce, not on the data they are trained on. This approach focuses on real problems, such as plagiarism and lack of attribution, while not closing the door to further innovation.<\/p><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For now, the status quo holds: AI companies are training models on available data, creators are protesting, lawyers are preparing lawsuits. One thing is certain: the debate over royalties for AI training is not an academic dispute over legal technicalities. It&#8217;s a question of whether culture in the age of automation will remain a relationship between people, or become just a resource to be processed by systems operating on an industrial scale. And whether anyone will remember who created that culture.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The debate over royalties for training AI models on others&#8217; creative works is about more than money. On one hand, there&#8217;s the idea of open access to knowledge and the tradition of fair use. On the other, there&#8217;s the need to protect human creative labor in a world of mass, automated data extraction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":354,"featured_media":17214,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[798],"tags":[],"popular":[],"difficulty-level":[],"ppma_author":[776],"class_list":["post-17275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture-and-media-2"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":776,"user_id":354,"is_guest":0,"slug":"redakcja","display_name":"Redakcja","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Zrzut-ekranu-2025-07-10-o-16.00.36.png","url2x":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Zrzut-ekranu-2025-07-10-o-16.00.36.png"},"first_name":"","last_name":"","user_url":"","job_title":"","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17276,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17275\/revisions\/17276"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17275"},{"taxonomy":"popular","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/popular?post=17275"},{"taxonomy":"difficulty-level","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/difficulty-level?post=17275"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=17275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}