Addressing a hot-button issue for Hollywood and other creative industries, Google CEO Sundar Pichai predicted creators will soon be directly compensated for their contributions to artificial intelligence.
“I do think people will develop [economic] models around it,” Pichai said Wednesday at the New York Times DealBook Summit in New York. “There will be a marketplace in the future, I think. There will be creators who create for AI models and get paid for it. I really think that’s part of the future and people will figure it out.”
Asked by moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin if he envisioned “sending checks” to creators whose work helps train Gemini and other Google AI platforms, Pichai replied that he could see that “down the line.” Even as of now, he noted, the company is licensing select content for AI “where we see value,” from sources such as Reddit, the Associated Press and the New York Times. While some content owners have agreed to sell their wares to AI proprietors, others have held out and in some cases filed lawsuits against tech firms.
Music, which has been a Pandora’s Box throughout the digital age, is already a bedrock component on Google-owned YouTube. But as the video giant has integrated music generation technology over the past couple of years, it has “primarily given it as tools for artists to use,” Pichai emphasized. “We’ve been deliberate. We didn’t put music generation in the hands of users. We are giving it as tools to creators. That’s how we’re doing it in YouTube, primarily. We’re going to be thoughtful in how we approach these questions.”
The exec said there will always be a need to strike a balance between “understanding what is fair use, when new technology comes, versus how you give value back proportionate to the value of the IP and the hard work people have put in.”
On these “important issues,” he said, “I’m sure everyone – Congress, the Supreme Court – will want to weigh in.” Sorkin replied, “They will, but if they do, it will be too late.”
Multiple times during the sit-down, Sorkin queried Pichai about his outlook for the growth of the overall AI sector. Rival Sam Altman of OpenAI earlier Wednesday told the DealBook audience the boom times would continue, and with them “intense” challenges across broader society. Pichai offered a somewhat more muted assessment.
“Progress is going to get harder,” he said. “When I look at ’25, the low-hanging fruit is gone. The hill is steeper.” Asked if that meant growth is declining, he demurred. “I’m very confident there will be a lot of progress in ’25,” he maintained. “I think the models are definitely going to get better at reasoning, completing a safe course of actions more reliably – more agentic, if you will. You will see us push the boundaries.”
Compared with earlier times, when throwing computer processing power at the challenge resulted in dramatic headway, Pichai cautioned, “we’re going to need deeper breakthroughs as we go to the next stage.”
