Newstex is excited to announce our partnership with ProRata, an ethical AI company that aims to ensure that content creators are properly credited and compensated for their work. In this interview, Josh Freeman, ProRata's Vice-President of Business Development, explains how this collaboration supports Newstex publishers and transparency in AI-generated content.
Our entire approach is based on ensuring that, whatever content is used to answer a query, that content is properly attributed and we share 50% of the revenues on Gist to our content partners, proportional to the share of an answer created based on the claims in their content.
Josh Freeman, ProRata VP of Business Development
What made you decide to partner with Newstex?
Josh Freeman: ProRata's mission is to ensure that content creators receive fair credit and sustainable compensation in the era of generative AI. We work exclusively through partnerships for licensed content, so Newstex, with its relationships with hundreds of high-quality content owners, is a natural partner for us.
How does your attribution technology work in practice? Can you provide us with a walkthrough of the process from content ingestion to creator compensation?
Josh Freeman: When we ingest content from our licensed partners (again, content comes through licensed partnerships, not by scraping all the data across the Internet), we store it in databases that allow us to perform what is called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). We do not use partner content to train a Large Language Model (LLM). When a user asks a question on Gist.ai, first we select content that will be most relevant to the question, then we polish those pieces of content into a coherent answer and, finally, we look at each of the individual claims in that answer, compare them back to the content in our databases, and provide the attribution - what percentage of the claims in the answer come from each individual publication - and provide the citations back to the source content.
We work exclusively through partnerships for licensed content, so Newstex, with its relationships with hundreds of high-quality content owners, is a natural partner for us
One of the biggest challenges with AI-generated content is the lack of transparency in sourcing. How does ProRata tackle this issue?
Josh Freeman: Because we only use licensed content on a RAG basis, not scraped content from across the web and not content from a training model, we always know the source of the content in our answers.
You have already partnered with major media companies like Universal Music Group and The Atlantic. What has been the biggest takeaway from these collaborations?
Josh Freeman: We are deeply grateful to all of our partners. We think that partnering with high quality content creators - of any size - is the right thing to do ethically and also that using high quality inputs produces high-quality outputs. That is, you can create better answers using less content if the content comes from high quality sources.
ProRata's mission is to ensure that content creators receive fair credit and sustainable compensation in the era of generative AI.
Many Newstex publishers are independent writers and niche content creators. How can ProRata help them ensure that their work is properly attributed and monetized?
Josh Freeman: Our entire approach is based on ensuring that, whatever content is used to answer a query, that content is properly attributed and we share 50% of the revenues on Gist to our content partners, proportional to the share of an answer created based on the claims in their content.
With the rise of generative AI, many industries are struggling to define 'fair use.' What’s your take on the current state of copyright laws regarding AI-generated content?
Josh Freeman: I am not a lawyer by trade, nor do I play one on TV, but what we have observed is that, without high-quality content as an input, generative outputs tell you to put glue on your pizza. A sustainable ecosystem requires that all sides benefit - the generative AI providers, the content creators, and the users. Unless content creators are compensated, they will not be able to continue creating and the system will suffer for it.
Unless content creators are compensated, they will not be able to continue creating and the system will suffer for it.
About the author,
Michael Ellis
