OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appears to be warming up to the possibility of a revenue-sharing model for artists and creators whose works could be used to train AI models.
“I think it would be cool to figure out a new model where if you say ‘I want to do it in the name of this artist’ and they [the artist] opt in, there’s a revenue model there,” Altman said in an interview at TED 2025 held on Saturday, April 11.
Talking to TED curator Chris Anderson, the OpenAI frontman also explained that there are currently guardrails in place to prevent ChatGPT’s native image generator from generating images in the style of specific artists or creators.
Altman’s remarks come in the backdrop of a messy debate around AI-generated art that was re-ignited by the recent viral Ghibli AI trend on social media. ChatGPT-generated images in the art style of Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli sparked allegations of IP theft and copyright infringement from AI critics as well as Ghibli fans.
“Clearly there’s some cut and dry stuff, like you can’t copy someone else’s work. But how much inspiration can you take if you say I want to generate art in the style of these seven people, all of whom have consented to that. How do you divvy up how much money goes to each one? These are like big questions,” Altman said while onstage.
He also revealed that the GPT-4o-powered image generator within ChatGPT has a new memory feature that lets the popular AI chatbot remember the history of user queries. “Maybe if you want it’ll be listening to you throughout the day and sort of observing what you’re doing and it’ll get to know you and it’ll become this extension of yourself,” he said.
Altman further said that OpenAI was making the image generation feature in ChatGPT less restrictive by lightening the guardrails around speech harms.
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When asked about the potential for AI to replace humans, Altman replied: “There’s sort of two views you can take. You can say, oh, man, it’s doing everything I do, what’s going to happen to me? Or you can say, like, through every other technological revolution in history, okay, now there’s this new tool. I can do a lot more. What am I going to be able to do? It is true that the expectation of what we’ll have for someone in a particular job increases, but the capabilities will increase so dramatically that I think it’ll be easy to rise to the occasion.”
OpenAI recently raised funds at a staggering $300 billion valuation. The AI startup is currently working on developing models known as AI agents that can transact autonomously on behalf of users.
When asked about ChatGPT’s recent user growth spike owing to the viral Ghibli AI trend, Altman said, “I think the last time we said was 500 million weekly actives, and it is growing very rapidly.” “Something like 10% of the world uses our systems,” Altman added.
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