Creators’ content is being scraped for AI. AsqMe wants to put them back in control–and bump their audience engagement, too.

Swing by any creator industry gathering this year, and there seems to be one thing that’s on everyone’s mind: generative AI. Some creators dig it, some hate it, and most, regardless of digging or hating, are concerned about their content being scraped for LLM training without their consent. And that’s a valid fear: OpenAI, Apple, Nvidia, and more have all been accused of using YouTube videos to train their models.

So how can a company make AI-powered tools aimed to assist creators while, at the same time, reassuring those creators their content won’t be stolen?

That’s what AsqMe is setting out to do. Co-founded by former Adobe colleagues James Alexander and Paul Shustak in 2023, AsqMe partners with content creators to help them answer questions from their audiences across platforms.

AsqMe’s debut product, FirstDraft, is meant to be a “personal conversational AI” that writes answers to audience questions based on the creator’s content. Once a creator partners with AsqMe, they hook it up to their YouTube channel (more platforms coming later this year), and FirstDraft learns from their videos, so answers it writes are based on information from the creator, and are written in the creator’s voice.

“One of the problems creators have is getting the same question over and over again,” Shustak says. “And that makes sense. If you make a video about repairing a roof, fixing a carburetor, doing your nails, and enough people see it, enough people are going to have the same question about your content.”

A second, more frustrating problem is that creators are often asked questions they already answered in their content–either in the video the asker is commenting on, or in another video on their channel.

Both of these problems, combined with the sheer volume of questions that pour in across platforms every single day, make it difficult for creators to find the desire or time to answer their audience members, and so that point of engagement is often dropped, Shustak says.

“There are creators who have mastered answering questions,” he says. “But most creators just don’t have time. They don’t have the bandwidth. And so with the advent of generative AI, the fact that creators already have a corpus of material is great for them.”

That’s where the concept of FirstDraft came from: creators already having a library of their own content that would allow a language model to be trained only on their content, with their permission, as a kind of Q&A-specific assistant.

Creators can choose to charge for answering questions

Once FirstDraft has trained on a creator’s content, it’s ready to go. The creator has to share their AsqMe inbox link with their audience, and viewers submit questions directly on AsqMe’s platform. FirstDraft writes answers to any questions that come in, those answers are sent to the creator for preview, and then, once they’re approved, are sent to the asker.

Part of the reason AsqMe sees FirstDraft as a “revenue center” for creators is because the answers it generates aren’t just text. Say we go back to Shustak’s example above, and a creator made a video about fixing a carburetor. If an audience member asks a question about the process, FirstDraft will write a text answer to the question, then link the asker to the precise part in the video where their question was answered.

“We decided, you know what, let’s not just draft an answer for them in their own voice based on their proprietary content,” Shustak says. “Let’s also give them a link to a queued-up video clip of their content, so the audience member could read the answer, click the link, and get redirected back into the creator’s content, where the creator wants them in the first place.”

Another reason it’s a “revenue center” is because creators can choose to charge askers for replies on AsqMe, sort of similarly to how Cameo charges for custom videos. AsqMe says most creators charge between $10 and $20 per answer.

This approach is all part of its creator-first mission, AsqMe says. A creator’s content will not be used by AsqMe outside of training their own personal AI, and if they choose to stop using FirstDraft, all their data will be deleted.

“What’s so powerful about what we’re doing is we’re undermining an argument that technology companies make about, ‘Well, there’s no other way to do this than to pull all of it and put it in an LLM,'” Shustak says. “And we’re saying no, a creator who’s got 200 videos can absolutely use their own proprietary content to answer their own questions, and that content does not need to be subsumed into a large LLM with nebulous payment and licensing.”

Creators, he says, “can control their own destiny, and we’re making that possible.”

FirstDraft rolled out to all creators this month. You can check it out here.

AsqMe is a Tubefilter partner.