Created by Humans is a San Francisco startup building a licensing marketplace that lets authors and other creators sell the rights to their work for AI training, reference, and transformation - and get paid for it. Founded by former Scribd CEO Trip Adler, the platform lets rights holders claim their books (by ISBN or upload), set the terms under which AI companies may use them, and track usage and payments, positioning licensing as an alternative to lawsuits between creators and AI developers.
Trip Adler is a San Francisco tech founder who co-founded Scribd in 2007 and ran it for 16 years, building it into a reading platform used by roughly 100 million people. In 2024 he launched Created by Humans, a licensing marketplace that lets authors and other creators set terms and get paid when AI companies use their work to train and run models. His pitch is not to fight AI in court but to build the plumbing for a fair market between creators and the labs racing to license high-quality content.

Timothy B. Lee is an independent AI journalist and newsletter writer who runs Understanding AI, a Substack newsletter with over 263,000 subscribers that explains how artificial intelligence actually works - minus the hype and minus the doom. Drawing on a rare combination of a computer science master's from Princeton, two decades of tech policy reporting at outlets like Ars Technica, the Washington Post, and Vox, and an instinct for clear, jargon-free prose, Lee has become one of the most-read independent voices in AI journalism. His superpower is translating complex machine learning concepts into accessible explainers that neither oversell nor undersell the technology.