How my dad’s 1999 children’s book led to the future of creator-owned AI models

As an entrepreneur and someone building in consumer technology, I’m realizing that much of what you bring into the world is rooted in the ideas that were instilled in you as a kid. Each of us is led into the world by our parents who open doors for us with a slight push of encouragement, watching to see how far we walk in. Looking back, it’s clear now that my love for creativity, storytelling, and finance can be attributed to illustrating with my dad while he worked on his first children's book, ‘Lucky The Golden Goose’.

Lucky The Golden Goose is about compound interest and the value of saving. Told through the perspective of an entrepreneurial Goose named ‘Lucky’, Lucky learns that rather than spending the pumpkin seeds he earns, if he saves and plants his seeds he’ll get back much more in return. Lucky ends up running the farm and instilling sound financial practice in his fellow livestock. It’s a story about finance, with a dash of rebellion, told through creative illustrations. While helping create Lucky seeded my interest in crypto and AI, little did I know they would literally intersect 25 years later.

Back in December, I brought TITLES and my childhood together by training a unique image model on the images in his book. Not only is it great at replicating his craft but it’s changed his view of the creative process and value of his work. For example, he’s been digging up his old illustrations from the basement and digitizing them to further train his model so he can use it to write another book. What otherwise would have been old work withering in the basement took on new life. His unfinished work shifted from being an end product to instead improving his model he could use to create more and better with. This is a behavior change that represents a reordering of how people create moving forward and I couldn’t be more excited about it.

While we’re swimming through emergent waters, what my dad, other artists, and IP holders are noticing is simple. If my dad can sell copies of his book, it also might mean that its contents are valuable enough to train a model on. Meanwhile, if the model is useful enough, he might use it to help write another version of his book. Finally, if the new book is valuable, it’s likely that others might find the model useful to create with as well. In other words, our data has moved from powering algorithms to understand what we like to replicating what we can do, in effect becoming working assets in our image.

The implications of this movement are fundamental to our place online and we’re seeing the “tug of data wars” playout live in front of us. Mass data leaks, lawsuits for unethical scraping, and data sales by incumbent platforms are showing the misaligned incentives fostered by today’s business models and infrastructure for ownership. It’s clear the identities we’ve been told we own, live inside the walled gardens of stewards in which their interests are at odds of our own. It’s early but we’ll need a new approach to ownership and compensation for people who create and drive the value that feeds AI.

Enter TITLES – creative tools powered by artist-trained AI models. We help artists and IP holders maintain ownership and monetize their artistic likeness. Our tooling makes it easy for artists to create their own custom AI models that replicate their style. Artists can then share them where they maintain attribution and make money when they’re used. TITLES uses crypto infrastructure to uniquely provide artists durable attribution and automatically split earnings whenever their model generates income from work produced using it.

This is working and available now. To date, TITLES has been used to create over 32,000 creations using artist-trained models each attributing and sharing earnings back with their owners. We’re at the forefront of these experiments launching new publishing infrastructure, model creation systems, and ways for artists to make money everyday.

Today, we’re launching ‘Lucky Golden’, my dad’s custom model trained on his illustrations. Try it, here. You can use it along with any custom model in the TITLES ecosystem on our site and mobile app including FarCats, Zorbs, ENERGY, and Doge. If you’re an artist or IP holder looking to create your own model with TITLES, reach out to me on Twitter or Farcaster.

P.S. – The first twenty collectors of this blog will be mailed a copy of ‘Lucky The Golden Goose’ by John Wrenn.