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.