Anyone else selling on TurboSquid? What's your take on the Contributor Fund / AI training data deal?
Curious to hear from other TurboSquid contributors here. Do you still sell there, and if so, what's your experience been with the Contributor Fund, the program where they license contributor assets for AI training?
Honestly, when it was first announced it seemed like a pretty good deal. Sooner or later someone's going to scrape or license 3d stuff for AI training anyway, so getting paid for it directly seemed better than the alternative.
But I've been trying to get clarity on this for almost two years now. There was one payment early on, and then nothing since. They claim that further payouts will happen in the future, but the moment you ask when, the answer is silence. No clear info on which assets are being used, who's using them, or when the next payment might actually show up. Repeated attempts to get a straight answer haven't gone anywhere.
Wondering if this is a common experience or if I'm missing something. Has anyone actually seen ongoing payments from this? Anyone had better luck getting information out of them directly? And more generally, has this changed how people feel about uploading new work there?
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Them selling assets to AI scrapers just makes it worse. The only money that could justify helping people put me out of the job would be enough for me to never need to work again. And even then, I'd have to wrestle with the moral concern of also helping to put everyone else out of a job.