On Monday, Cloudflare published research saying it observed the AI startup ignore blocks and hide its crawling and scraping activities. The network infrastructure giant accused Perplexity of obscuring its identity when trying to scrape web pages “in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences,” Cloudflare’s researchers wrote.
Source: Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping | TechCrunch
Adult film producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media have filed a significant copyright infringement lawsuit against tech giant Meta. A complaint filed at a California federal court alleges that their films were downloaded via BitTorrent for AI training purposes. With at least 2,396 movies at stake, potential damages could exceed 350 million dollars.
Source: Copyright Lawsuit Accuses Meta of Pirating Adult Films for AI Training * TorrentFreak
If you have ever needed to send a file larger than 20mb, you have probably used or at least heard of the online file-sending service WeTransfer. You may have also heard, earlier this month, a chorus of uproar on social media led by artists sharing screenshots of WeTransfer’s updated terms of service agreement that granted the company the right to use all materials transferred via their service, without any remuneration to the uploader or regard for their privacy.
An estimated 5.6% of U.S. search traffic on desktop browsers last month went to an AI-powered large language model like ChatGPT or Perplexity, according to Datos, a market intelligence firm that tracks web users’ behavior. That pales beside the 94.4% that still went to traditional search engines like Alphabet’s Google or Microsoft’s Bing. But the percentage of traffic that went to browser-based AI search has more than doubled since June 2024,
As publishers fret about decreased traffic from Google, the search giant has begun rolling out AI summaries in Discover. The feature will appear on iOS and Android in the U.S., with a focus on trending lifestyle topics like sports and entertainment. Google also noted the feature will make it easier for people to decide what pages they want to visit.
Source: Google Discover adds AI summaries, threatening publishers with further traffic declines | TechCrunch
Of the top 100 search keywords driving traffic to dailymail.co.uk (which redirects to a .com URL in certain countries), 32 triggered AI Overviews in May 2025. In 68.8% of searches for these keywords where an AI Overview was present in May, no click was made by the user to go to the site (compared with 54.9% of searches not driving a click overall when looking at the site’s top-100 search terms).
Source: How Google AI Overviews is fuelling zero-click searches for top publishers
Source: Meta’s AI Model ‘Memorized’ Huge Chunks of Books, Including ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘1984’
Bots harvesting content for AI companies have proliferated to the point that they’re threatening digital collections of arts and culture. Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) say they’re being overwhelmed by AI bots according to a report issued on Tuesday by the GLAM-E Lab. The surge in bots that gather data for AI training, the report says, often went unnoticed until it became so bad that it knocked online collections offline.
Source: Bots are overwhelming websites with their hunger for AI data
The company said AI-made music accounts for just 0.5% of streams on the music streaming platform but its analysis shows that fraudsters are behind up to 70% of those streams. AI-generated music is a growing problem on streaming platforms. Fraudsters typically generate revenue on platforms such as Deezer by using bots to “listen” to AI-generated songs – and take the subsequent royalty payments, which become sizeable once spread across multiple tracks.
Source: Up to 70% of streams of AI-generated music on Deezer are fraudulent, says report
Audiobook listeners and listening hours on Spotify increased by more than 30% and 35%, respectively, from January 2024 to January 2025 in the U.S., U.K., and Australia, helping to boost audio sales of several major publishers, according to the streaming service. The growth aligns with broader industry trends. The Audio Publishers Association recently reported that audiobook sales grew by 13% in 2024, with 99% of revenues generated by digital audiobooks.
Source: New Listeners Boosting Sales for Spotify, Publishers