Kickstarter's AI Data Transparency Initiative for Project Creators

0:00With AI becoming ever more popular in projects that we see in most tech companies and also a lot of creatives. I think that there's a lot of people that are definitely interested in how this is going to be regulated, not just from a governmental perspective, but also from a company-wide perspective. There's a lot of platforms like Fiverr that take on a lot of content. There's platforms like Kickstarter that you're able to create projects on. And people want to know what is being generated by AI on these platforms. There's been a lot of talk about how consumers will know. So recently, Kickstarter has made an adjustment and a change to their policy, talking and addressing specifically the use of AI in projects on the platform.

0:41So today we are going to be diving into what they have said and how they have found themselves in the crossfire of this AI situation. So a lot of generative AI tools like Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT typically employ to create, you know, these are the ones you typically use when you're creating art and text and such. they were trained using publicly available images and text. So the interesting bit, though, is the fact that these obviously lack credit to whatever original text or image that was being pulled to create what they had. So the ability to opt out for artists, photographers, writers, right, everyone has been pretty non-existent up until this point, right?

1:20If you wrote a post on Reddit five years ago, it probably got sucked into ChatGPT, OpenAI's giant database that was used to train ChatGPT. and there's not really much you can do about it at this point. However, a lot of the companies behind these AI tools say that, you know, they're kind of within the bounds of fair use, doctrine, which particularly in the US, but not all creators really agree, right? There's a lot of controversy around that. ChatGPT, OpenAI, they say they're good. A lot of people complain and say, you know, we should have been paid for whatever you trained on, especially where there's, of course, monetization of the AI generated content or the AI tool itself.

1:55So responding and coming into this whole controversy is Kickstarter, who recently announced a new policy change they're going to be doing, which requires AI-based projects to provide, quote, relevant details about their AI use on their product pages. So this information includes how AI content will be used, which parts of the project are original and which are AI generated. And you know, you can kind of imagine someone's writing a book, they get a bunch of people to fund their creation of the book and then the whole thing's generated by AI. Maybe people would be concerned about that and maybe that's what Kickstarter is kind of coming at it from with the angle they're coming at it from.

2:36I think in a pretty significant move to kind of support transparency and consent, Kickstarter is also requiring new AI related projects to disclose information about the source of their training data. So beyond if you're just, you know, creating a book or a video game or something that uses AI assets. If you are creating an actual AI company that is, you know, developing some sort of AI technology and you want people to back you or fund you on Kickstarter, you actually have to talk about the source of your training data. So project creators will need to detail how their sources handle consent and credit and will have to implement their own safeguards such as opt-out or opt-in mechanisms for content creators.

3:16So if you are training, you know, a data set to be able to create better images for example and you would like to get money from kickstarter you actually have to have an ability for people to opt out of joining your data set in order for you to you know be able to use their platform so i think these disclosure requirements could also be a bit controversial just in themselves despite obviously the efforts of people like the european union to keep these kind of practices in law so one example is that open ai has kind of refrained from revealing its recent systems training data sources you know and they said this is more competitive and legal liability reasons but a lot of people are just saying that if people knew where they got it from the people would complain and so that's why they're not saying so i think the new kickstarter policy is going to take effect on august 29th so there will be no plans to enforce it retroactively for projects submitted before that date that's according to suzanne page cats who's the Kickstarter's director of trust and safety.

4:18So in a blog post that was shared with TechCrunch, Paige Katz actually explained the rationale behind this whole policy. So she said, quote, we want to make sure that any project that's funded through Kickstarter includes human creative input and properly credits and obtains permission for any artist's works that it references. It builds trust and sets the project up for success. So the policy will be enforced by essentially introducing a new set of questions in the project submission process where creators are going to be required to disclose whether they're using AI technology in their projects and if they have consent from the owners of the workers used to train or produce their AI tools.

4:58So once submitted, AI projects are actually going to undergo Kickstarter's standard human moderation process. So they're actually going to have to be looked over by an actual person. And then approved projects will have an added use of AI section to their product pages. which is going to be indicating any AI components on that. So PageCats also emphasized that transparency is kind of what is really being wanted by the community, right? People backing some of these projects, they want the transparency on this. And then she also warned that any undisclosed use of AI may actually lead to a project suspension, right?

5:35So if you're doing something that you're not supposed to and you say you're all good and they find out they will actually suspend your project or they can suspend your project. They said, quote, we're happy to directly answer this call from our community by adding a section to the project pages where backers can learn about a project's use of AI in the creator's own words. So Kickstarter first kind of signaled its intent to revisit its policy on generative AI last December, questioning if, you know, using media owned by creators or others in an algorithm's training data constituted copying or mimicking an artist's work and the platform has since been i i'd say they've been pretty cautious towards you know its new policy um in one case i think it banned a group called unstable diffusion which was fundraising for a generative ai project uh with no safety filters on it uh which you know has been controversial by many um in another instance i think a project that used ai to essentially plagiarize a comic book was initially approved but then it was later removed.

6:40So obviously, even with human moderation, it's a little bit challenging unless someone brings it up. And I think with this new policy, Kickstarter is really just trying to aim to foster transparency and ensure that proper credit and consent mechanisms for artist works are in place. And that's potentially setting a precedent for other platforms that are kind of in the same space looking at what the controversies might be around that. Overall, I think this is a fairly decent policy. At the end of the day, I think users deserve more transparency on AI, where the content came from. Now, will we see this out of someone like OpenAI or MidJourney?

7:17I doubt that they'll be doing that soon, but one can only hope. And I think that this is definitely pushing it in the right direction, putting pressure on them to, you know, essentially disclose eventually where all of their content comes from, be able to cite it and, you know, inevitably compensate the people that originally created it in some way or shape or form that is financially viable for the platform, obviously. But I think that'll be where we kind of move in the future.