Already, we are seeing the use of AI, with all its negative ramifications for writers, painters, photographers, and musicians, being endorsed because it means that ‘everyone can be an artist’, or, as ACE would have it, a ‘creative practitioner’. This is likely to converge in future with another recent intellectual position, which contends that meritocracy – hitherto regarded as the only way of championing fairness – is itself unfair.
Source: AI against the arts
GoDigital has confirmed that the funding was led by Bank of America, with participation from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, East West Bank, First Horizon, Fifth Third, and Flag Star. The company said on Monday (November 3) that the funding brings its total capital raised to date to over USD $1 billion. The funding news arrives alongside a revamp of the GoDigital brand.
Source: Cinq Music parent company rebrands, raises $230m in fresh funding via new GoDigital Music division
The Music Artists Coalition responds to Universal Music Group’s partnership with AI platform Udio, demanding clarity and compensation. “Every technological advance offers opportunity, but we have to make sure it doesn’t come at the expense of the people who actually create the music—artists and songwriters,” said Irving Azoff, board member and founder of MAC. “We’ve seen this before—everyone talks about ‘partnership,’ but artists end up on the sidelines with scraps.”
Source: Irving Azoff, MAC Demand ‘Creative Control, Fair Compensation’
AI browsers present new problems for media outlets, because agentic systems are making it even more difficult for publishers to know and control how their articles are being used. For instance, when we asked Atlas and Comet to retrieve the full text of a nine-thousand-word subscriber-exclusive article in the MIT Technology Review, the browsers were able to do it.
AI search startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images, which gives it permission to display images from Getty across its AI-powered search and discovery tools. The deal marks a notable shift for the company, which has been hit by allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, and signals an effort to establish more formal content partnerships.
Source: Perplexity strikes multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images | TechCrunch
Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are already planning to pour $400 billion into artificial intelligence efforts this year. They all say it’s nowhere near enough. “We’ve been short [on computing power] now for many quarters. I thought we were going to catch up. We are not. Demand is increasing,” said Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer. “When you see these kinds of demand signals and we know we’re behind, we do need to spend.”
Source: Big Tech Is Spending More Than Ever on AI and It’s Still Not Enough
YouTube channels from major news publishers and creators were in video data sets used by Microsoft, Meta, Snap, Runway, and Bytedance. For example, 11,604 videos from the official YouTube channel of The New York Times across 11 different data sets are in the database. Over 8,000 of these videos, though, came from a single training data source — Runway Gen-3.
Universal Music has unveiled a partnership deal with Stability AI, which is set to develop a suite of music creation tools with the major. Ultimately, said tools will advance “responsible innovation that supports both artists and rightsholders while preserving the integrity of the art form,” according to the companies. While those companies opted against shedding light on the products’ specifics, they did emphasize an objective of putting out “fully licensed, commercially safe AI music tools.”
Source: Universal Music Group Announces Stability AI ‘Strategic Alliance’
Universal Music Group said on Wednesday it has settled a copyright infringement case with artificial intelligence company Udio and that the two firms will collaborate on a new suite of creative products. Under the agreement, the companies will launch a platform next year that leverages generative AI trained on authorized and licensed music.Source: Universal Music settles copyright dispute with AI firm Udio
Spotify faces a new class action lawsuit that alleges the company has “turned a blind eye” to “mass-scale fraudulent streaming” on its platform. The lawsuit suggests that the use of bots is widespread on Spotify, but the only example it cites pertains to Drake. Filed in California District Court last night with rapper RBX (who is a cousin of Snoop Dogg) named as the lead plaintiff, the lawsuit alleges that foul play has led to Drake’s exorbitant streaming numbers.
Source: Class Action Against Spotify Over ‘Mass Fraudulent’ Drake Streams