TORONTO – Artificial intelligence pioneer and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton says Big Tech should pay more for the data they train their systems on.
The British-Canadian computer scientist says he feels this way because he fears people working in creative industries are not being adequately rewarded by the companies making use of their content.
Exacerbating the situation, he says are some governments which seem uninterested in protecting the creative industries.
Hinton’s remarks, which came at the DiscoveryX tech conference in Toronto, touch on topic that has riled up multiple creative industries recently.
Writers, illustrators, publishers and others have noticed AI companies have trained models on content they found online or in free databases and now allow users to spit out new works based on that original material.
In an effort to extract compensation for the use of their work and protect their copyright, several media companies, book publishers and music labels have been pursuing lawsuits against AI developers.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 16, 2025.
