One of the initial and longstanding use cases of Web3 has been to empower and reimagine the creators’ economy in a way that brings fair value and reward to creators. NFTs emerged as one of the forefront technologies to help with giving creators greater control of their work, but other technologies have since evolved. AI’s emergence has opened up a whole new ecosystem of productivity tools via generative AI. This new ecosystem holds unimagined potential, and while we are barely scratching the surface, so far, the impact of initial applications is mind-blowing.
AI adoption by companies has surged from 50% to 72% between 2023 and 2024, with 65% of companies now using generative AI, double the number from 2023. Most of these companies (35%) utilize generative AI for marketing and sales, predominantly for creating content (images, copy, responses) for campaigns and strategies. For some context, 2.3 billion images were used to train Stable Diffusion’s image generator, while DALL-E2 by OpenAI utilized “hundreds of millions.”
However, these numbers, while painting a picture of growth, also underline new growing pains for creators. A majority (52%) of companies using this technology view intellectual property infringement as a major risk. This concern arises because the use of creators’ work (art, articles, photographs) to train AI models is often unauthorized, uncompensated, or lacks proper recognition for the creator.
