Amazon is reaching out to news publishers about opportunities to license their content for the next generation of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, slated to debut next year, Axios has learned. The company plans to debut a new, smarter version of Alexa, using generative AI to power customized responses to real-time user queries about the news.
Source: Amazon eyes news partners for revamped AI Alexa voice assistant
A new report from CISAC, the global umbrella group for authors’ societies, has a sobering prediction: 24% of music creators’ revenue could be taken by generative AI by 2028. The news is almost as bad for creators in the audiovisual industry (TV, film, video, etc.). By 2028, they face a loss of 21% of the income they would have made if generative AI didn’t exist.
Musical AI and Beatoven.ai’s collaborative project, set to launch in the second half of 2025, aims to “ensure rights holders are compensated for every use of their repertoire.” The platform will be built on Beatoven.ai’s technology, training on a catalog of over3 million songs, loops, samples, and sounds. Musical AI will provide data licensing, attribution of generated outputs, and payments to rightsholders.
An Argentine horror-fantasy film called The Witch Game is coming to theaters in the U.S. and UK, but the Spanish-language movie doesn’t rely on subtitles or English speakers to voice the performances. Instead, AI tools will recreate the original actors’ voices and have them speak English. It’s a controversial move as it is an actual instance of the frequent warnings about AI taking people’s jobs.
Source: Would you watch a foreign film dubbed with AI to sound like the original actors?
A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin wanted to determine if audio clips alone are sufficient for AI to understand the visual characteristics of its environment, a skill once thought to be exclusive to humans. The team used generative AI to successfully convert sounds from audio recordings into street-view images.
Source: AI Generates Accurate Images of Streets From Sound Recordings
AI has the power to pump out words in record speed. And already, that’s substantially inflating the book publishing market. Lovers of LLMs are pushing into the traditional publishing system, building their own book-publishing entities. They’re jump-starting their own publishing imprints, and self-publishing books (often slop) on digital marketplaces.
Source: How AI is accelerating—and devaluing—book publishing
Spotify has limited third-party developers’ access to its internal data, sparking speculation that the move is meant to prevent user and music data from being used to train AI models. In a Spotify for Developers blog post, the streaming service announced that third-party developers will no longer be able to access certain kinds of data from Spotify.
Source: Are Spotify’s changes to third-party developer access meant to combat AI scraping?
Source: Amazon develops video AI model, The Information reports
Nearly three-year-old GoldState just recently confirmed the sizable song-rights purchases (but not the exact value thereof) via its website. Said website also bills Create Music Group as part of GoldState’s growth portfolio; Flexpoint and Goldstuck injected $165 million into Create over the summer, but the corresponding announcement didn’t mention GoldState by name.
Source: GoldState Music Reportedly Buys $200 Million Worth of Music IP