Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

Data pricing & emerging markets

• Reported rates: roughly $1–2 per image, $2–4 per short video, $100–300 per hour of long-form video, ~$0.001 per word of text.
• Some see this as high enough to compensate end users; others note the money mostly goes to platforms, not creators.
• Debate over whether initial prices are arbitrary “for fun” vs. real market discovery in a new, opaque commodity market.
• Economists in the thread frame text vs image pricing partly as volume discounts and per-byte differences.

Ownership, consent & privacy

• Strong concern that users never meaningfully consented to their personal photos, chats, or essays being used to train AI.
• Counterview: users did agree via ToS/EULAs, even if few read or understood them.
• Many see this as exploitative, especially for poorer users who trade data for “free” services.
• Voice data and phone calls as training data are viewed by some as legally/ethically possible with consent; others say “no such thing as anonymized recordings.”

Big platforms as data troves

• Social media, photo hosts, cloud email/docs, and lab/health firms are seen as sitting on “goldmines” of structured, labeled data.
• Dispute over how much private messaging (e.g., encrypted chats) can or would be used; some trust regulation, others assume backdoors or heavy metadata use.

Human vs AI learning efficiency

• Several comments contrast massive AI training sets with relatively modest human experiential data.
• Others argue humans actually ingest huge multimodal streams over years plus evolutionary “pretraining.”
• Feedback and embodiment (touch, physics, causality) are seen as key human advantages current models lack.

Economic and societal impacts

• Concern that “free” AI agents will be ad-driven and manipulative, not truly free.
• Fears of data-driven discrimination in insurance, hiring, criminal justice, often invisible to individuals.
• Worry that commodified data and closed models will lock up the “gift economy” of the open web.

Copyright, search, and creators

• Many argue training on copyrighted data without permission or compensation should be infringement.
• Comparisons drawn to past justifications for web indexing and ROM “archiving.”
• Skepticism that LLMs can replace search: hallucinations, lack of traffic/compensation to sites, and harm to journalism.
• Others note users already prefer LLMs to degraded web search for many queries.

Future data supply & alternatives

• Questions about maintaining training quality as the web fills with AI-generated “copypasta.”
• Ideas raised: paying people for essays/emails, domain experts writing for training, or platforms soliciting user-written content for AI.