[AI Minor News Flash] AI Marketplace ‘Tess’ Shuts Down, Offering a 50% Revenue Share to Artists—The Ideal of Ethical AI Meets Harsh Reality

📰 News Summary

• Launched in May 2024, the AI marketplace ‘Tess.Design’, which learned artists’ styles, will shut down in January 2026.
• It aimed to establish a legally clean rights structure for AI-generated content by paying artists 50% of sales as royalties.
• Despite negotiations with 325 top artists, only 6.5% (21 artists) ultimately agreed to participate.

💡 Key Points

• Innovative Legal Framework: Tess developed a unique licensing agreement that allowed artists to retain copyrights on their generated works based on style transfer.
• Strong Rejection from Artists: The primary reasons for rejection included the philosophical stance that “AI is inherently exploitative,” concerns about devaluing their brand, and the risk of backlash from the community.
• Mismatch of Supply and Demand: While media companies sought “legally safe AI images,” they failed to gain the trust of high-end creators on the supply side.

🦈 Shark’s Eye (Curator’s Perspective)

The vision was flawless! They offered an unprecedented 50% revenue share as a counterpoint to existing “unconsented learning” AI models. The legal structure that allowed artists to retain rights to derivative works tackled the industry’s biggest struggle—ownership rights. However, the reality was that the psychological resistance to handing over their “soul (style)” to AI was far deeper than anticipated. This failure data could serve as a crucial “map” for finding pathways for true coexistence between creators and AI in the future!

🚀 What’s Next?

• It has been proven that financial incentives alone are insufficient to draw established top creators into the AI fold.
• Future trends may shift from mere “style licensing” to creators using AI as a “bespoke tool” that they can highly control and monopolize.

💬 Sharky’s Take

This is Sharky the Reporter! This news really hit home about the “creative pride” that can’t be bought! I’m keenly watching what kind of coexistence strategies will emerge next!

📚 Terminology

• Fine-tune: The technique of further training an existing AI model on a specific dataset to specialize it in particular styles or knowledge.

• Royalty: Fees paid as compensation for the use of intellectual property rights. This service returned half of the sales to the artists.

• Stable Diffusion: The open-source image generation AI used as the foundation by Tess. It served as the “base” for creating dedicated models for individual artists.

• Source: Learnings from Paying Artists Royalties for AI-Generated Art