Hundreds of websites trying to block the AI company Anthropic from scraping their content are blocking the wrong bots, seemingly because they are copy/pasting outdated instructions to their robots.txt files, and because companies are constantly launching new AI crawler bots with different names that will only be blocked if website owners update their robots.txt.
Source: Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones)
Ask almost any publishing CEO his or her sales, sales growth, net profit, returns percentage, advance write-offs, marketing expenditure, and much else, and they’ll know the answers. But ask how much a company has earned worldwide from collective licensing income through reproduction rights organizations (RROs), and that CEO won’t have a clue—and may not even know what an RRO is.
Perplexity AI will soon start sharing advertising revenue with news publishers when its chatbot surfaces their content in response to a user query, a move that appears designed to assuage critics that have accused the startup of plagiarism and unethical web scraping. Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s head of business, told TechCrunch that the company was actually exploring the program in January, before publishers started leveling accusations.
Source: Perplexity details plan to share ad revenue with outlets cited by its AI chatbot
Two artists have sued the United States securities regulator to determine whether non-fungible tokens fall under the commission’s authority. Attorneys representing the plaintiffs — law professor and filmmaker Brian Frye and songwriter Jonathon Mann — sought clarification on which acts could trigger US securities laws when creating and selling NFT art.
Source: Artists sue SEC over confusing security status of NFTs
In a new paper from Imperial College London experts, researchers propose a mechanism to detect the use of data for AI training. They hope that their proposed method will serve as a step towards greater openness and transparency in a rapidly evolving field of Generative AI, and will help authors better understand how their texts are used.
Source: Phantom data could show copyright holders if their work is in AI training data
The drummer recently gave an interview to The Sunday Mirror where he discussed the potential to forge a Pink Floyd reunion via AI. David Gilmour declared the band to be over in 2015, saying that the iconic prog-rock band had run its course. “The thing to do would be to have an AI situation where David and Roger become friends again,” he continued, adding: “We could be like ABBA by the time we’ve finished with it.”
Source: Nick Mason wants to use AI to create new Pink Floyd songs
Reality has hit the AI hype machine. On Alphabet’s recent earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai touted widespread adoption of Google Cloud’s generative AI solutions, but with a caveat—and a big one. “We are driving deeper progress on unlocking value, which I’m very bullish will happen. But these things take time.” The TL;DR? There’s a lot of generative AI tire-kicking, and not much adoption for serious applications that generate revenue.
The company, whose market value is estimated at $80 billion as of February, is likely to spend as much as $7 billion this year to train and operate its chatbot. That means more money needs to be raised, even as a path to profitability gets murkier, thanks to increasing competition. The OpenAI costs include renting server capacity from Microsoft that’s required to maintain ChatGPT, the report said. That accounts for about $4 billion.
Source: OpenAI, Home Of ChatGPT, May Lose $5B This Year – Report
Investment giant Apollo Global Management is backing Sony Music Group to the tune of $700 million to help the company fund music acquisitions, it was announced Friday (July 26). The deal could provide the financial assistance needed for Sony’s planned acquisition of Queen‘s recording and music publishing catalogs. Sources have told Billboard the band is seeking $1.2 billion for its catalogs and ancillary income stream.
Source: Sony Music Receives $700M from Apollo Global for Music Investments
The ChatGPT parent company addressed publisher concerns about AI-driven search directly in its post announcing the prototype on Thursday, saying SearchGPT “is designed to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them in searches.” The prototype is not yet open to the public, having launched for now “to a small group of users and publishers to get feedback.”
Source: OpenAI testing prototype search engine with news publishers