According to research by MarketsandMarkets, the global market for AI training datasets is projected to grow from $2.68 billion in 2024 to $11.16 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of over 22%. Yet the size of the market tells only part of the story. Much of this activity happens under NDA, without pricing transparency, and often with questionable sourcing. The line between what is licensed and what is scraped remains blurred, and, increasingly, contested.
Source: The Hidden Economy Behind AI: Data Licensing Takes Center Stage – Kaptur
To offer users a tidy AI summary instead of Google’s “10 blue links,” companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic have started sending out bots to retrieve and recap content in real time. According to data shared exclusively with The Washington Post, traffic from retrieval bots grew 49 percent in the first quarter of 2025 from the fourth quarter of 2024.
The AI armageddon is here for online news publishers. Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting. Traffic from organic search to HuffPost’s desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb.
Fraudsters are flooding Spotify, Apple Music and the rest with AI-generated tracks, to try and hoover up the royalties generated by people listening to them. These tracks are cheap, quick and easy to make, with Deezer estimating in April that over 20,000 fully AI-created tracks – that’s 18% of new tracks – were being ingested into its platform daily, almost double the number in January.
Before the proliferation of A.I. music generators, before the emergence of Spotify and the advent of the iPod, before Brian Eno had even coined the term “generative music,” Mr. Cope had already figured out how to program a computer to write classical music. It was 1981 and, struggling with writer’s block after being commissioned to compose an opera, he was desperate for a compositional partner. He found one in a floppy disk.