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Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art
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Overview
Tess.Design launched in May 2024 as a marketplace for AI-generated art, offering artists a 50% royalty on the use of their styles. The platform was shut down in January 2026 after less than two years of operation.
Summary from kapwing.com.
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Community reactions
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Hacker News · kapwing.com
Hacker News discussion ↗
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Based on 5 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-03-10.
- Praise: The article provides a refreshing look into the challenges of startup innovation, highlighting the hard work and risks involved in developing new AI applications.
- Praise: Acknowledging the importance of compensating artists for their styles reflects a growing awareness of intellectual property issues in AI-generated content.
- Concern: The reliance on a base model trained on potentially stolen work raises significant ethical and legal concerns about the legitimacy of the AI's outputs.
- Concern: Limited artist participation in the platform and poor image generation capabilities compared to established models like OpenAI indicate serious shortcomings in the service's effectiveness.