As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. “The world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” says on its site.
Source: AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop
Search referral traffic is in decline due to increasing usage of AI. This has been common knowledge among online publishers since the proliferation of chat interfaces and generated summaries in search results, and we now have concrete data to prove it with the AOP’s newly launched “Artificial Intelligence Publisher Impact Study”.
Source: Google search traffic to leading UK publishers set to halve by Q3 2027
For publishers, businesses, banks and others that relied on Google to funnel its billions of users to their websites, the impact has been unmistakable as the company has increasingly incorporated A.I. into search. Google’s users are no longer leaving Google after a search and are just reading its A.I.-generated answers, they said, which means fewer people are coming to their websites and search traffic has dropped.
Source: Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed
Udio has selected content-security firm BuyDRM to protect the streaming of its AI-generated music. The Austin-based company will provide multi-DRM support across Google Widevine, Apple FairPlay, and Microsoft PlayReady through its KeyOS MultiKey Service. The deal, announced on July 14, forms part of the technical infrastructure behind Udio‘s move from copyright defendant to licensed music platform.
Source: Udio taps content-security BuyDRM to secure its AI music ‘walled garden’
The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers.
Source: Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius
Media research expert Nic Newman has warned the ability of AI models to provide “liquid content” in different formats is a “really serious challenge” to news media. He gave the example of asking Claude questions relating to the UK heatwaves, including where the UK stands in terms of air conditioning compared to other countries and previous temperature records. Claude was able to produce information in a Q&A format, generate graphs which were filterable by different parts of the world, and show Met Office warnings.
Source: Claude’s ability to remix ‘liquid content’ is ‘serious challenge for news media’
A new Edison Research at SSRS study commissioned by Spoken, an AI audiobook company, revealed that the company’s multi-voice productions achieved a higher favorability rating than human-narrated productions. “There’s opinions good and bad for AI among the American consumer, right, so we wanted to just purely get the reaction,” Edison Research vice president Megan Lazovick said. “That was what was really fascinating, was the response that people were open to AI and thought it enhanced their experience.”
Source: Surprise: Many People Prefer AI Audiobooks, New Study Finds
A coalition of record-label and artist groups is pushing streaming giants to label music generated with artificial intelligence, as the industry grapples with how AI is changing the business. The group said it plans to work with streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music to add labels on tracks indicating when AI was used to produce them. AI usage is flagged voluntarily by artists, record labels and distributors.
Source: Record Companies Push to Label AI Songs on Streaming Platforms
The New York Times, The New York Daily News and 15 other media organizations said in a federal court filing on Thursday that OpenAI was withholding evidence that could play a key role in high-profile lawsuits the companies filed against the artificial intelligence start-up. With their filing, the publishers called for legal sanctions against OpenAI, accusing the company of violating court rules and acting in bad faith during the litigation’s fact discovery phase.
Source: New York Times and Other Publishers Ask Court to Penalize OpenAI
US Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaiʻi introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at increasing transparency around artificial intelligence-generated content, requiring clear labels when people are viewing AI-made material or interacting with an AI chatbot. The AI Labeling Act comes amid growing concern in Hawaiʻi and nationally about the effects of unlabeled AI content, including reports that AI platforms are being used to create deep fake photos and generate scam calls using an AI-generated voice of a loved one.
Source: Schatz introduces AI-generated content transparency bill