Dataset Earnings

"Don't look to A.I. for the divine"

Over the last year or two a new term has shown up in the royalty statements of certain music licensing / stock music libraries. The term is "dataset earnings" and many artists who contribute to these sites have suddenly found amounts ranging from $25 to $5000 deposited in their accounts at various points. Way more than most make for standard royalties. When I was first notified about this, the terminology was typically vague:

"Datasets are a product offering developed to support companies building computer vision and Large Language Models (“LLM’s”). Datasets are sets of content and metadata organized by a specific theme or topic that can include images (including photos, illustrations, and vectors), videos, music, and sound effects. Datasets are comprised of various metadata, including keywords, titles, and descriptions.

Datasets provide a potential new source of revenue by expanding our reach to new customers and industries, including AI researchers, and leading technology developers and manufacturers."

Basically, they are selling the artists data to 3rd party A.I. companies who use this data to train their A.I. systems. This is concerning because it sounds like a sneaky way of getting out of paying ongoing royalties to artists for their work. The artist creates a piece of music, uploads it, the song is "studied" by the A.I. system alongside thousands of other creators and used to make a frankenstein piece of pseudo-art. Once they have the data from the artist they can continue to use this forever more but the artist sees no ongoing royalties, having agreed to waive that right for the initial dataset earnings payment. Eventually human creators will not be necessary, these music licensing libraries will simply use the A.I. to generate new content from the data it has gathered. The A.I. companies will receive the payment that would have went to the artist as royalties.

I've seen lots of people delighted with their few hundred or thousand pounds, and understandably, as most musicians are struggling financially. The implications though are that these musicians could bring about their own demise. The ones who do it as a hobby don't care. They weren't expecting to get much from their music so a short-term windfall suits them. If you are in it for the longrun it is more concerning.

This is why I encourage people to buy from me directly, through the website or Bandcamp. We need a much simpler way of transaction between the artist and audience. We need to remove the middlemen. The more people who buy directly from the artist, the more we can keep it about Music. A simple transaction of a song or album or live performance for money. Even if artists were well-rewarded as an ongoing thing for "dataset earnings", songs are written for people to hear, not for machines to study. That's part of the thrill for an artist and as a listener it is comforting to know someone else feels the way you do. We are not science experiments!

I find it interesting that many people in spiritual circles talk of the Archons/Reptilians and how they can't create. They can only copy. Like the concept of the devil. They need something already there - someone elses creation - to distort, manipulate in some way. Many in spiritual circles also speak of how A.I. is the devil mind. It is a manifestation of the psyche of these archon/reptilian beings. When you apply this to this "dataset earnings" situation it makes sense. They can't create the music themselves, they need some original material to work with. So again, just like with the old system, they need artist 'slaves' to produce content for them. The music industry is often referred to as the "machine" and for a reason, except now they are literally showing the machine the artists will be slaves for. The A.I. machine, the archon/reptilian psyche. Before it was hidden behind suited music execs, A&R men and so on.

To me, it just looks like another sign of the direction the elites want to take the world. In every area of life right now they are trying to eradicate humanity and replace it with a cold, digital, sterile technocratic hell. We must resist this by bringing more humanity into whatever we do.