Financial Support from Artificial Conversational Agents?
In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, a new player is making waves – ProRata. Founded by internet pioneer Bill Gross, the company aims to revolutionise the way AI-generated content is handled, particularly when it comes to attribution and compensation for publishers.
Gross, the grandaddy of the internet who founded GoTo.com in 1998, introducing the concept of allowing advertisers to bid for placement in search engine results, has a vision for a future where publishers may band together to block web crawlers that large language models (LLMs) rely on to harvest data.
The genesis of ProRata can be traced back to late 2023 when Gross began mulling an idea for a way for publishers to receive attribution and compensation every time a chatbot surfaced material from their sites. This idea culminated in the filing of a patent for the technology that would become his latest company: ProRata, on January 4, 2024.
ProRata's unique selling point is its ability to produce a breakdown of the percentage of each answer that comes from a given website or document, factoring in what source reported the information first. It achieves this by analysing the entirety of an AI-generated answer and weighing how much of it came from various sources.
One of the key features of ProRata is its chatbot, Gist Search. This innovative tool compensates publishers, including Wikipedia, when their content is surfaced. ProRata is designed to run targeted ads within its interface, with half of the revenue generated going back to ProRata and the other half distributed among the sources from which the answer drew.
The company's long-term goal is to shift people's views and protect creative rights. Gross believes that without proper incentives for creators, everything will turn to "AI slop." He also envisions a future where AI-generated queries start running ads, and advertisers will be willing to pay a premium because they allow for more direct targeting.
Gross's past experience suggests that even the most unlikely changes can occur over time. This sentiment was echoed in his response to the New York Times' copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, filed in late December 2023. Gross felt indignant about the lawsuit and saw it as the first firing shot of a serious organization with enough money to fight back.
While ProRata has secured partnerships with notable publishers like The Atlantic, no publicly available information indicates that any prominent media companies have joined Bill Gross's company to provide their archives for training the AI-generated response monitoring and compensation system.
As we move forward, the outcome of the New York Times lawsuit may compel companies to adopt a system like the one Gross has developed. With Gross's track record of innovation and his unwavering commitment to protecting creative rights, ProRata is poised to play a significant role in shaping the future of AI and the internet.
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