MusicAnswers has spent two years conducting a survey of college student music creators to better understand their experience with song registration agencies—specifically the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC). The results are pretty grim, with a majority of college students being unaware of the MLC’s purpose or what they do in the industry.
Source: Only 17% of Music Creator College Students Familiar With MLC
Wikipedia is attempting to dissuade artificial intelligence developers from scraping the platform by releasing a dataset that’s specifically optimized for training AI models. The Wikimedia Foundation announced on Wednesday that it had partnered with Kaggle — a Google-owned data science community platform that hosts machine learning data — to publish a beta dataset of “structured Wikipedia content in English and French.”
Source: Wikipedia is giving AI developers its data to fend off bot scrapers
Netflix is building a new search experience aimed at improving the discovery experience, and it’s going to use AI to do it, the company’s CEO Greg Peters said during its first-quarter results conference call. Peters said Netflix is working on “interactive search that’s based on generative technologies” to help people find different titles.
Source: Netflix is revamping search with AI to improve discovery | TechCrunch
Los Angeles-based Pex, an audio content identification platform, has been acquired. Pex’s new owner is a company called Vobile, which offers digital content protection and transaction services for entertainment companies, platforms, sports leagues, music labels, and publishers. Vobile has confirmed that Pex COO Amadea Choplin has joined the company as Head of Music Business, while founder Rasty Turek, formerly CEO, will act as a consultant to Vobile going forward.
Source: Pex acquired by copyright protection and content monetization company Vobile
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton are challenging one of AI development’s accepted core beliefs – that the more pre-training data the better the performance. As reported by HPCwire, a new paper discuses the concept of “catastrophic overtraining,” whereby extended pre-training can harm a model’s performance after fine-tuning.
AI-generated media fundamentally alters how digital content is produced, distributed and consumed. AI models can now generate hyper-realistic images, videos and voices, raising urgent concerns about ownership, authenticity and ethical use. The ability to create synthetic content with minimal effort has profound implications for industries reliant on media integrity.
Source: AI-generated content needs blockchain before trust in digital media collapses
Meta announced on Monday that it’s going to train its AI models on public content, such as posts and comments on Facebook and Instagram, in the EU after previously pausing its plans to do so in response to regulatory pressure due to to data privacy concerns. The company will start training its AI on users’ content in the EU this week, it said. Users’ interactions with Meta AI will also be used to train its models.
Source: Meta to start training its AI models on public content in the EU | TechCrunch
The Internet Engineering Task Force has chartered a group it hopes will create a standard that lets content creators tell AI developers whether it’s OK to use their work. Named the AI Preferences Working Group (AIPREF), the AIPREF charter suggests “attaching preferences to content either by including preferences in content metadata or by signaling preferences using the protocol that delivers content” as the ways to get this done.
Source: IETF building tech to tell AI scrapers what authors want
European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, for breaking a landmark law to combat illicit content and disinformation, said four people with knowledge of the plans, a move that is likely to ratchet up tensions with the United States by targeting one of President Trump’s closest advisers.
A report this week by CMU claimed that Suno’s ReMi lyrics model was “spitting out entire sets of lyrics to well-known songs in response to simple prompts”, including works by Eagles, Midnight Oil and Bush. Now songwriters body The Ivors Academy has called for Suno to remove ReMi from its platform due to those claims. “Suno’s new tool is the latest example of unethical AI firms stealing the work, art and livelihoods of lyricists, songwriters and composers,” said CEO Roberto Neri.
Source: Ivors Academy slams Suno over lyrics-regurgitation claims