The

most viewed cover of his song is by J. Fla Music, which has over 350 million views on YouTube. I'm

in love with the shape of you. Be pushing blood like a man that did.

Although my heart is falling too. I'm in love with you. YouTube. Another cover performed by Walk Off The Earth features weird instruments like kitchen utensils and a jack-in and that brought in 27 million views. I'm

in love with the shape of you. They push and pull like a magnet. But my

heart is falling too. I'm in love with you. The rock band, Our Last Night, did a cover of the song that was shot solely on an iPhone and received 28 million views. So basically, there's a whole ecosystem of artists that cover popular songs. And by doing so, they extend that song's reach. YouTube decided to lean into

that. So they were making more money for the artist than the actual artist. So then, of course, the artists are like, hmm, we're collecting checks doing nothing. We're very happy with this. And so within 10 years, there was this big push by the labels to try and get YouTubers to cover new releases. So we saw a complete switch just because we figured out the consent, the control and the compensation. You

know, I just invested in a company called Parada.ai, and they are trying to bring to market this idea of attribution as a service. So if your data has been used to trade an AI model, whatever your data is, right, might be a publisher, a creator, et cetera, their algorithm can detect what percent of the prompt's answer is due to your data piece, and then you get a cut of the revenue. So it's a new business model, and I'm curious if it'll scale, but if it does, I think it solves a lot of these issues. But

I also think the intent is in the right place. You know, the problem, and I'm sure you already know this, is we're talking about thousands, millions of pieces of data that are being ingested into this. So when we're talking about fractional compensation, you know, artists complain about the pennies on the dollar they get for Spotify streams. I mean, this is going to be way worse. But I think people care more about do they feel that they're actually being included in the conversation than what are they actually netting out at the end of the day. I think there's a philosophical argument here that is a tougher one to sell to the masses. And I don't necessarily think we should be using this as an argument for tech companies continuing to use all this data without permission. Even just us as human creatives, we're collecting data and information around us all the time, right? Our brains do not store attribution models for all of the sources of which we've learned our various trades and skill sets. And so if we think about AI more analogous to the human brain, then we could just argue that it's just a much higher capacity. It's like a savant who's just pulling from all of these sources, but it's operating much the same way human brain does. And I don't know, it's not like we force artists to give royalties to their mentors or the people that have inspired them to create the work that they have. That is such a fascinating alternative

way to think about this.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not a very popular one for artists, but I think it's real because this is actually how, I mean, these systems are designed to mimic the human brain. How closely they actually do so, it's hard to say. But if we think about it in terms of that neuroscience perspective, it's an interesting thing to chew on. I

also think there's a certain purity that some artists are holding on to. You know, they develop their skills over years and years of work and practice. And now you've got this AI tool that can kind of mimic that. And so this all can feel very inauthentic and a little threatening. Do you think that's a fair take? I

completely understand where these artists are coming from. I can't imagine feeling like one minute, you know, you've spent your entire life working on honing a craft and then something else can generate it in under five seconds. It is threatening. For me, as an artist, as someone who's made my livelihood off of film, music, television, digital media, for some reason, I just feel the call of adventure is so much greater. I don't feel that we need to be special in order to still gain tremendous love and passion for our creativity and our exercise of that creativity.

I think a lot about this question of what does it mean to be human in the age of AI? And I think I agree with you, like AI doesn't have to threaten our sense of self, right? It doesn't. We could, we could stay grounded in the creativity and the empathy and the authenticity. And

we still get to decide how we apply these tools. I mean, for me, I think creativity is the opposite of just doing one single thing incredibly well. For me, creativity is an exploration. It's a journey. It's a synergy of all of these different elements and pulling them together. And so by definition, using AI feels like the next step.