---
title: "What’s missing from the AI workflow: incentives for content creators to provide training data"
date: 2023-05-04
description: "My general argument AI bots require training data to be effective Content creators require some form of ROI for the training data..."
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/content-creators-need-roi-from-ai
---
# What’s missing from the AI workflow: incentives for content creators to provide training data
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 AI bots require training data to be effective. Content creators generate part of the training data source.

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 Content creators require ROI (e.g., recognition, attention, revenue) for the content they supply.

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 AI bots will need to provide ROI to content creators to sustain a long-term content source in the future.

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 Since backlinks to creator sites aren’t possible, content creators might create logins and paywalls for content access. In the best scenario, AI will force writers to raise their content to inimitable levels.

## AI bots require training data to be effective

This premise needs little explanation. What would AI bots be without all the internet sources they use for training data? Not much. The more data AI bots have access to, the better they become. As such, they consume data sources like hungry trolls: Stack Overflow, Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia, news sites, etc. These sources provide the mass of needed data for training AI systems.

## Content creators require some form of ROI for the training data they supply

Many people are floored by what appears to be a pure fountain of information—consuming information without ads, without slogging through hit-or-miss sources, without the glut of lightweight say-nothing articles, etc. Read this article by Vipul Shekhawat: [GPT makes learning fun again](https://www.vipshek.com/blog/gpt-learning), which was recently [trending on Hckrnews.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35783158). Shekhawat is floored about how much better it is to learn from GPT-4 than by using search engines and sorting through human-written pages.

Shekhawat explains how the AI bot adapts to his question level, providing him with an interactive learning experience tailored to his exact interests. He provides a compelling step-by-step description of his learning journey (about LED light). Like Shekhawat, yes, I agree that the AI chat experience can exceed the search engine experience. I wrote about this in my post, [AI chat interfaces could become the primary user interface to read documentation](/blog/ai-chat-interfaces-are-the-new-user-interface-for-docs).

Shekhawat concludes, “After getting used to learning with GPT-4, I can’t imagine going back to the old way. The difference feels almost as profound as going back to flipping through a textbook.”

Apart from the interactivity, he says not being confronted with ads contributed to the delight of the experience:

> One of the biggest reasons learning has become cumbersome is that the web is littered with advertisements and content marketing that obstruct your ability to actually delve into a topic. When learning about topics that overlap with things people want to sell you, Google will sometimes include 3-4 ads before actual results. Even if you use an alternative search engine, the actual content on the web is often low-quality or written to sell you a product. Of course, GPT itself may start contributing to making it worse soon, since it’ll be used to generate more of it.

In other words, GPT-4 didn’t try to sell him anything or hijack his attention. It gave him exactly the information he asked for, and nothing more. He could completely control the information level, direction, and flow.

He says there’s a lot of substantial information on the web, but it’s trapped under a layer of billboards, ads, and other commercialization (“cruft”):

> Over the past 20 years or so, humanity has poured itself onto the web. All the world’s information, yes, but also all the world’s anxieties, fears, and superficiality. The web has become commercialized: an information highway plastered with billboards.
> 
> But underneath it all, the substantive information is out there. It’s just scattered and hard to find. GPT lets people tap into the treasure trove the web represents, without all the cruft. It enables anyone who can formulate and ask questions to learn so much more about any subject, so much faster.

GPT-4 removes all the cruft and delivers the raw information that was sitting there underneath all along. By allowing users to connect with this source, exactly adapted to their interests, it “makes learning fun again.”