This reminds me of the articles I occasionally see in the local newspaper about a restaurant that is closing down. So often it’s one that I’ve never heard of before that. To me, that’s the number one issue. If your likely customer base (or at least an audience member who reads a lot about the industry/market) hasn’t heard about your product, how are you going to have a successful business?

I wonder, did they pay for the artists whose art they took without paying or asking to train that LLM model they are promoting? I guess we know the answer :)

I mean there's no point; everyone still gets super mad even in the cases where models where trained only on content that a company owns or has paid for.

I wish artists would stop with the "it stole our work bullshit" and just be more honest about the "it can do what we do and we're terrified and scare for our future" part.

Because that I can 100% understand, and contrary to previous jobs just disappearing, we do live in "the future" and things like UBI or free cross-training should be available for this sort of thing.

> One engineer who left Kapwing in fall of 2025 said that the short-lived Tess investment contributed to burnout.

Don’t take this personally.

Even if you told this person to work constantly and they believed in you and the business, it’s not totally your fault that they burned out. I say this as someone that has burned out twice, is currently burned out, and blames those that I currently and formerly worked for. I know the problem is as much me as them. Yes, employers have a responsibility to their employees not to burn them out. But, if they do, even if the employer is in a power position where the employee felt they had no other choice, and I felt that both times, the employee can choose not to work that much or care that much for almost whatever that means- if you’re literally holding a gun it’s different of course.

I know of a developer that committed suicide and the toll that took on the employer. But the employer can’t take on all of that themselves.

I’m sorry that your business failed, but I hope that something good comes out of this.

Also- I’m not saying that any part of your responsibility in burning out this person was ok. Just that not all of it is your fault.

I'm not a native English speaker, but since when became 'lessons' a 'learnings'?

  Despite being more popular than “lessons” in the corporate setting, “learnings” is still incorrect. It's an erroneous plural form of the colloquial term “learning.”

As somebody who occasionally gets tiny ASCAP checks I think an ASCAP/BMI model might work for artists (and maybe even writers?) I guess this is more like SESAC, but maybe that's how this will end up working.

Are there successful non-AI artist platforms for works of art?

The individual who figures out how to do this will be both wealthy and beloved.

the spotify comparison is telling because spotify succeeded by being better than piracy, not by being more ethical. tess was trying to compete on ethics against tools that were just flat out better at the actual job.

i generate hundreds of images weekly for video content and the honest truth is i never think "i want this specific artist's style." i think "i need a documentary still that looks like 1970s film grain" or "i need a character that matches my last 50 frames." consistency and speed matter way more than provenance. the few times i tried artist-specific fine tunes the quality was noticeably worse than just prompting a good base model well.

the 6.5% artist signup rate buried in there is actually the real story. they cold emailed 325 high end editorial artists and got 21. those artists didn't want passive income from AI - they wanted AI to not exist in their market at all. paying someone royalties to automate away their livelihood is a weird value prop no matter how you frame it.

How about that few want one artist’s particular style reproduced, instead they want what they are vaguely seeing in their head produced from a cacophony of styles