The Future of Creative Work: How Fawad Elusio Zafar’s Creation Rights is Establishing New Standards for the AI Economy
“Your first project isn’t potentially your last project. No matter the outcome of any situation, you’re continuously learning skills and improving.” - F. Elusio Zafar, CEO and Founder of Creation Rights
AI is poised to transform the creative industries. Not only is it changing the way in which images, videos, and music are made, but it’s also raising questions around how human creators will be credited and compensated in an AI-led world.
F. Elusio Zafar recognized that navigating these questions wouldn’t just require solving moral challenges, but also technical ones related to identifying and tracking AI and human authorship. Drawing on his background in data authentication, Elusio set out to build Creation Rights and establish new standards for creative work.
Creation Rights: The next iteration for content distribution on the internet
Creation Rights is a human and AI content marketplace that helps artists protect their work from unauthorized use and receive the recognition and compensation they deserve.
Generative AI models are trained upon the work of human creators. In most cases today, human artists and copyright holders do not receive credit when their work is distributed through AI platforms, often resulting in lost value for creators or retaliatory litigation.
While we wait for regulations and lawmakers to catch up, Creation Rights is building a solution to help artists, agencies, and technology companies ensure fair AI use today. The platform runs on a metadata-driven tracking system that tags, certifies, and registers artistic work, making it possible to identify who the original authors are for all content, whether AI or human, and track how content is used and distributed over time.
Creation Rights also automates royalty payment distribution to ensure creators are paid for the use of their work. This enables AI companies and media agencies to credit and compensate human artists appropriately, and gives creators greater control over how their work is used.
Creation Rights is currently in a private beta working with several companies in the media and advertising space. In the long run, Elusio aspires to work with agencies, media companies, and creators to mitigate IP risk and pay original authors correctly.
Elusio’s journey to Creation Rights
Elusio watched first hand as generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, and Midjourney captured the world’s imagination in the early 2020s. Recognizing that the creative outputs of generative AI models would be increasingly dynamic, he questioned how creators would monitor the way in which their work was being used by AI as models generate outputs at scale.
With a background in authentication technology for data governance and data management, Elusio built and patented a metadata-driven tracking system that would enable content creators to tag their work with digital ownership information that AI systems can recognize. By helping creators own, control, and monetize their work, Creation Rights is establishing the standards for how creative work will be credited and compensated in the AI economy.
Elusio’s advice for other founders
Every founder is venturing into the unknown, and Elusio’s mission is no exception. From his time at Creation Rights and experience founding previous startups, Elusio explains that building resilience for the psychological ups and downs of the startup journey, and continuing to learn throughout the process, is critical.
“Your first project isn’t potentially your last project. No matter the outcome of any situation, you’re continuously learning skills and improving, which is a good thing not a bad thing,” he notes, citing Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game as a helpful resource.
At the same time, Elusio explains that it’s important to know your pain and progression threshold, and when it’s the right time to take care of your wellbeing. “You don’t have to be a masochist. You should understand your limits and take care of your wellbeing. These are really important to your life and your growth cycle.” Finding partners and co-founders that complement your skills, personality, and working style is then critical for maximizing effectiveness of the team as a whole.
To learn more, you can follow Elusio on Linkedin and visit creationrights.com.
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