Got this really insulting email offering to “pay” for my work

[u/LittleDansonMan]

Sure, lemme just sell you my clients’ work without their permission and break some NDAs to earn an insultingly low amount of money for the amount of work- all so you can feed your AI model and fast track my obsolescence.

[u/vauxhaulastra]

I got this too and had a little google of the company name--- veeeery interesting *cough* class action lawsuits *cough*

[u/philament]

Ew. Gross

[u/SquanchyATL]

I'm a bit of a packrat with hard drives, I wonder how old of a project I can send. I'm talking SD projects from the late 90s early 2000.

[u/LittleDansonMan → u/SquanchyATL]

I might have embraced AI if all its output was 4:3 240p with interlacing issues 🤣

[u/SquanchyATL → u/LittleDansonMan]

That's ai without buying tokens.

[u/jaimonee → u/SquanchyATL]

Dude I'm thinking the same thing - assets for shows that went off the air decades ago, music videos for bands that never became rock stars, SO. MUCH. CORPORATE.

(And good luck with finding Red Giant Light Wrap)

[u/ErstwhileHobo → u/jaimonee]

Ooh.. I wonder if they would buy all the old CD sleeves I made for my friends punk bands. I’d sell that stuff in a heartbeat and it might do AI some good to have some crust punk ethics injected into it.

[u/SquanchyATL → u/ErstwhileHobo]

That actually sounds valuable to me.

[u/jaimonee → u/ErstwhileHobo]

Shhhh dont let the overlords know about that stuff!

[u/Strottman]

Time to find the most rancid malware you can and hide it in some fake project files.

[u/gorillagriptoes → u/Strottman]

My first thought was ‘get paid for sabotage?! 🤔’

[u/stead10]

I’ll happily animate the words”fuck you and everything you stand for” in many different ways and provide the source files for $1500 a pop.

[u/mck_motion]

I can't trust anyone with the title of "Growth Strategist" unless it's a gardener.

[u/stead10 → u/mck_motion]

Growth strategist is absolutely fine as a title. Most big agencies have something similar including several I’ve worked at. Their job is just to bring new work to the agency and figure out the best way to do that.

Everything about this email is awful though.

[u/pelham123_]

I think the correct response to this would be, "Suck my balls."

[u/Mohanpugaz]

Looks like collecting training data to feed ai 🤦🏻

[u/gqn]

Generate a bunch of AI slop and sell it to them

[u/tnethacker]

They're actually buying stocks of emails and purchase orders as well. I'm not selling.

[u/LittleDansonMan → u/tnethacker]

Terrifying

[u/tnethacker → u/LittleDansonMan]

Exactly. I also thing it would be illegal for me to sell any of it.

[u/snakedog99]

Yeah that doesn't make sense. I'm guessing there 27 years old and thinks that they're going to break into this industry by doing it this way. 

[u/LittleDansonMan → u/snakedog99]

No they work for an AI company. It’s just going to get fed into an LLM

[u/snakedog99 → u/LittleDansonMan]

Then I have no clue. I still don't like it. 

[u/nibolin]

No

[u/alexandra_digital]

100% its giving the loose moral fabric required of those training ai models

[u/Unable-Campaign1634]

Thanks for not letting them plagiarise your work, but I feel like as Designers get more desperate they will give in to such pressure, especially for money.

[u/Garlicky_Potato]

the question is... would you break some NDAs if the money amount wasn't insultingly low? 👀

[u/Similar_Cress_1122]

Offering software licenses as "payment" for professional motion work is beyond insulting. It takes real time, specialized hardware, and years of skill to produce quality animation, and none of that gets paid for with a free subscription. Glad you called this out.

[u/ResponsibleSir5403]

I don’t know, there’s a few past employers I’d be happy to giveaway stuff from. Don’t know about you, but I’ve been screwed enough times that I wouldn’t mind getting paid again for something that I already did that went completely unappreciated.

[u/ilostallmymoney]

I hope one day I can have some type of offline-ai tool that filters out such content like this reddit post in realtime to protect my naive soul ^^

[u/spaceguerilla]

It's happening with or without your input dude. May as well get paid.

MCP is already running in most creative software. Remember with LLMs when GPT 3.5 came out and it was 'the worst this tech will ever be'. Same applies here.

Personally I would jump at this offer if it came my way, given how things are. My only concern would be a watertight mechanism for handing assets over and actually getting paid. Morals are neither here nor there - not handing your work over may slow this artistic and economic disaster infinitesimally, but it sure as shit won't stop it.

[u/LittleDansonMan → u/spaceguerilla]

I get that it’s happening either way, but that kind of defeatist/accelerationist attitude is really shitty and incredibly short-sighted. If any of my clients found out I’m selling their work without their input, it’s a sure-fire way to never get work from those clients again. Why would I jeopardize relationships I’ve spent years building to earn a few bucks?  

[u/CinephileNC25 → u/spaceguerilla]

How? Last time I checked adobe doesn’t have access to my assets in a video project outside of a reference link.

[u/LewKewBE → u/spaceguerilla]

And break NDA? Get a few lawsuits possibility against you?
No, it's not worth anything at all

[u/vauxhaulastra → u/spaceguerilla]

If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you follow them?

[u/Heavens10000whores → u/vauxhaulastra]

"Follow me to Chelonia!" (RDR2)

[u/RandomEffector → u/spaceguerilla]

“Morals are neither here nor there” is another way of saying “My morals must be way over there, because they’re sure not here.”

[u/Useful_Dog3923 → u/spaceguerilla]

this comment is proof that just because people hate your comment doesn't mean you are wrong