That estimate comes from a new report by U.K.-based research firm Ampere Analysis. The spending across the six companies — Disney, Comcast, Google, Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix and Paramount Global — will reach a new high in 2024 and account for 51% of the total content spending landscape, up from 47% in 2020, according to Ampere.
Source: Six Biggest Companies to Spend Record $126 Billion on Content in 2024, up 9%, Led by Disney
The current crop of generative AI systems needs high quality data, and lots of it. To source this data, big tech companies continually scour the internet, scooping up terabytes of content to feed the machines. But since the advent of widely available and useful generative AI systems in 2022, people are increasingly uploading and sharing content that is made, in part or whole, by AI.
Source: Is generative AI doomed? An expert’s take on the “model collapse” theory
As the engine powering the world’s digital artists, Adobe has a big responsibility to mitigate the rise of AI-driven deepfakes, misinformation, and content theft. In the first quarter of 2025, Adobe is launching its Content Authenticity web app in beta, allowing creators to apply content credentials to their work, certifying it as their own.
Source: Adobe has a new tool to protect artists’ work from AI
The music creator economy was thrust into the wider music industry’s limelight with the Covid lockdowns triggering a surge in new creators. Our latest music creator report shows that progressively more creators are starting with lower expectations for streaming. Their royalty expectations are already so low that this is no longer a pain point for them. Instead, they are becoming critical of streaming’s ability to further their careers, focusing on the medium’s closed door between them and their fans.
GEMA, a German performing rights collection society and licensing body, has introduced a licensing model for AI providers, seeking to address the use of copyrighted music in AI training and the creation of AI-generated songs. GEMA proposes that authors should receive compensation beyond a one-time payment for training data. It suggests that such one-off payments may not sufficiently compensate authors given the potential revenues from AI-generated content.
Source: GEMA proposes licensing model for AI-generated music
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says there are complex copyright questions around scraping data to train AI models, but he suggests the individual work of most creators isn’t valuable enough for it to matter. In an interview with The Verge deputy editor Alex Heath, Zuckerberg said Meta will likely strike “certain partnerships” for useful content. But if others demand payment, then — as it’s done with news outlets — the company would prefer to walk away.
Source: Mark Zuckerberg: creators and publishers ‘overestimate the value’ of their work for training AI
Kyle Wiens recognized something was wrong in July when his staff at iFixit began receiving alerts about high traffic on their cellphones. They also were able to identify what had caused the issue: It turned out to be a web crawler sent out into the world by Anthropic, makers of the Claude chatbot, to try and gather training data.
Source: AI crawlers are hammering sites and nearly taking them offline
In the next few months, Google will begin to flag AI-generated and -edited images in the “About this image” window on Search, Google Lens, and the Circle to Search feature on Android. Similar disclosures may make their way to other Google properties, like YouTube, in the future; Google says it’ll have more to share on that later this year. Crucially, only images containing “C2PA metadata” will be flagged as AI-manipulated in Search.
Source: Google will begin flagging AI-generated images in Search later this year
Meta will begin using publicly shared content from adult users in the UK on Facebook and Instagram to train its artificial intelligence models. The company will use publicly available information, such as adult users’ posts, comments, photos, and captions on both platforms. In July, Meta paused AI releases in the European Union following the Irish Data Protection Commission’s orders to halt its AI assistant rollout in the EU due to data privacy concerns.
Source: Meta to resume AI training in UK after regulatory pause
Artificial intelligence datasets form the bedrock of modern systems. As tech giants and researchers push the boundaries of machine capabilities, the data they use quietly shapes the future of technology — for better or worse. The more relevant, high-quality information an AI system processes, the better it performs. This reality has sparked intense competition for data, with companies racing to amass ever-larger collections of text, images and other information.
Source: AI Explained: Inside the World of Datasets | PYMNTS.com