How Vermillio Tackles AI’s Creator Rights Challenge

As AI reshapes the entertainment industry, who controls and gets paid for the use of a creator's work and likeness? Vimeo is tackling that question with technology designed to track and license AI generated content. Joining us is Vimeo cofounder and CEO, Dan Neely. And and what was so interesting, copyright was the first fight in AI in this town at least. I'm trying to understand the distinction between copyright and likeness. Certainly. Yeah. I mean, if you think about copyright, it's a well understood well understood topic. Likeness is who you are. It's your voice, how you might move. It's your name in in of itself. All those things make up who you are as an individual. And if you are a famous person, that's ultimately who you are. That's how your fans recognize who you are. It's how... Who they relate to. But it's this unique right that has existed for a long time, but is... Has really... AI has really brought it to the forefront. You know, Dan, familiar exists for a reason. You... You're solving for a problem, but how how is that problem sort of manifest itself with time, you know, as as AI has more AI generated content that has hit the the market in the world. Yeah. When we started this business, back in... You know, we started thinking about it back in 2020. There were about 19,000 deepfake creations. GPT, Michael. GPT. Yeah. So, we started thinking about the problem because we've seen a couple of things but there were about 19,000 deepfake creations back there. Today, they're about a trillion. And so just to give you the kind of context of how much the scale has happened, it's just a gigantic problem. And reality is people are fans of things. And because they're fans of things, wanna create with things, and they also want to engage with things. And so those... When that fake stuff starts existing, fans go and engage with it. They don't know who created it. They don't know if it's actually from the person they're a fan. Right. But that likeness right is something that needs to be protected. It is so multifaceted and complicated. You know? A deepfake, to all intents and purposes, is is often unauthorized, use of someone's likeness. And then the question is, what... Who... To who does the value accrue? Mhmm. How do you solve for that that issue? Yeah. So it's it's only two things. First is let's identify all the unauthorized stuff. So our technology identifies across the entire Internet. All the Finds it. Finds it. Let's make sure we know... Understand what it is. Then our choices are, do we wanna take it down, or do we wanna leave it? So taking it down is... There's a bunch of bad stuff that's happening. Leaving it is, oh, my fans might have created something that's actually happening. A fight for the lawyers? It could be... It used to become a fight for lawyers, but it's something we... Now it's now it's technology where our technology can just automatically ask for it to be removed. And so we're doing that at scale today. And then it's about monetization. It's about attribution. How much of that is that new output that is a piece of music, is a new video, is just using my name to create an account? How much shall I be compensated for that as well? Okay. So then there is the motivation or enthusiasm of an individual individual to license their likeness. You know, what do you see in the in the world of, celebrity, creative, different artists in wanting to do this? I think we're in the in the... In what I described as the messy middle. The messy middle. The messy middle. It's a... So it's it's a gigantic issue. So if we think about permission at scale is AI's issue. Right? The AI... The entire infrastructure of AI, permission at scale is the problem because doing one on one deals is really not that complex, but they have to do it at a gigantic scale. They've gotta get hundreds of thousands of people to opt into this thing. They can't just think about, hey. It's one off here here there and and someone else. I I get where where we're we're talking about where the value accrues. Right? Who pays the artist? You know, is it the AI studio? We've had Loomer on. We've had Promise on the show today. Is it the traditional Hollywood studio? Then there's the creator economy. Like, who do they get paid by? What do you see? I see it. I see two things. I see... Certainly, the platforms are going to stop paying because they're gonna have content. They already have content on their platforms that uses likeness in an unauthorized manner. So we have to get to a place where that gets comfortable. Think YouTube. Think of the Metas platforms. It exists across every major distribution platform. Spotify, it's in all the places. So let's make sure people are getting compensation in the right way. Then there is how do we think about you have an authorized model? So let's say all of the people that are building models get likeness to actually be something that they have a right to in the same way they are with copyright. That compensation is gonna come from the amount of compute revenue that's been driven for those companies, not just, hey. I've got an interesting piece of content that someone's happened to engage with that I put advertising next to. The compute opportunity is actually the larger opportunity for these businesses and also for individual groups. Quick. How does Familio make money? It takes a a royalty? Or So we have roughly a 100,000 customers today. They pay us a monthly fee to protect them, and then we also take a... We have a transaction fee associated with when someone does a licensing. And very quickly, what happens next? Yeah. What happens next? We're in this moment where we have to get to permission at scale. It is the issue. It is the issue that needs to be unlocked. We built this business to solve the permission at scale problem. That exists so that we can say to, okay. Everyone has a chance to say, I'm in or I'm out. Once that once that gets managed, then ultimately, that... That's where we'll end. Net net, do the people you work with feel positive about AI or or, you know, you said the messy middle? I think that that... So for us, our customers are very concerned, then they get protected. Once they're protected, they're like, oh, now I can start thinking about what else to do because the optionality is mine. It's not controlled by platforms. It's controlled by me as an individual.