When machines paid for the data.

Somewhere on Discord in 2023
HypnoRains: Yup, my recent upload contributed 1.409% for AI-8’s highest score on the LIFE benchmark.
RockerHund: Woh! That is huge for a single creator. You are rich!
HypnoRains: Looks like I am.

In the summer of 2021, there was a new social network for sharing videos, stories, code, or games, basically anything you wanted. However, the content had to be original, and the creators had complete control over all the uploaded data. The funny thing was that there were no Ads, subscriptions, or new content was not pushed to the users. The app had a terrible UI for consumers and was mainly designed for creators.

The users soon figured out that the diverse the content was, the more stars it generated. The same was with multimodality of the content. e.g. if you had a video of a car driving while someone was doing a live commentary about the scene and driving, or longitudinal data fMRI of dementia patients along with their speech and video sample. Such content was highly rewarded, and creators with the highest stars were paid handsomely. Sports commentary, cooking videos, or Yoga videos were popular for some time. Creators started pushing the limits; new 3D sensors on the phone gave a new dimension and modalities for the creators to play with.

The content on the app was used for training new AIs. The app was a medium to create and curate high-quality datasets. The creators owned the data as NFT and was auctioned/leased to different companies to train their A(G)Is.