U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett in federal court in Manhattan barred the three companies on Friday from launching Venu, deciding that the FuboTV sports streaming service would likely prevail on claims that the new broadband entity would “substantially lessen competition and restrain trade.” Fubo launched in 2015 as a start-up focused on streaming sports programming.
Source: Judge Bars Disney, Warner, Fox From Launching Sports Streamer Venu
AI checkers today use a variety of techniques, starting with text analysis. As with all prompt queries, the submitted text is broken down into tokens and then normalized, removing punctuation and other non-essential indicators. They then use a technique called vectorization, which converts the text into a mathematical hash code for comparison to other text.
In this age of artificial intelligence (AI), determining whether text was written by a bot or a person has become increasingly difficult. Several detection products have already popped up — but with decidedly mixed results. Now, Grammarly is kicking off its tool, which it believes will better detect which parts of a document were created by AI versus humans.
Source: Grammarly to roll out a new AI content detector tool. Here’s how it works
Dotdash Meredith and Ziff Davis tell shareholders that they haven’t seen any significant traffic changes due to Google’s AI Overviews. “Now that the AI Overview experience is in full circulation, we wanted to revisit the analysis we did in Q3 of 2023 relating to the frequency of AI overviews being presented to users,” Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah said on the company’s earnings call. “At this point, we don’t see it as a significant change to the search experience.”
Source: Publishers report ‘negligible’ traffic impact of Google AI Overviews
California lawmakers have amended a bill that would create new restrictions for artificial intelligence, paving the way for first-of-their-kind safety rules that could set new standards for how tech companies develop their systems. The bill has sparked fierce debate in the tech industry, with Silicon Valley giants, academics and investors taking sides on whether to regulate a nascent technology that has been hyped for both its benefits and its dangers.
Source: California A.I. Bill Is Amended; Vote Is Expected by End of August
As the 5,000-strong Animation Guild starts negotiations with studios, outsourcing jobs and AI are the major points of contention. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks and former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, has predicted that generative AI could eradicate 90 percent of animation artist jobs. The word that some negotiators at the union are using to describe this moment is “existential.”
Source: As AI Encroaches on Hollywood, Animators Say This Is An Existential Moment
The bill would require large companies to ‘perform basic safety testing on massively powerful AI models,’ but Pelosi is concerned about stifling innovation in the state. “The view of many of us in Congress is that SB 1047 is well-intentioned but ill informed,” the California Democrat said in a statement, pointing to objections from her fellow Democratic members of Congress, Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Anna Eshoo, and Ro Khanna.
Source: Nancy Pelosi Slams California AI Bill as ‘Well-Intentioned But Ill Informed’
Many Procreate users can breathe a sigh of relief now that the popular iPad illustration app has taken a definitive stance against generative AI. “We’re not going to be introducing any generative AI into our products,” Procreate CEO James Cuda said in a video posted to X. “I don’t like what’s happening to the industry, and I don’t like what it’s doing to artists.”
Source: Procreate’s anti-AI pledge attracts praise from digital creatives
Online publications increasingly face a lose-lose dilemma: allow Google to use their published content to produce inline AI-generated search “answers” or lose visibility in the company’s search engine. The crux of the problem lies in the Googlebot, the crawler that scours and indexes the live web to produce the results you see when you enter search terms.
Source: Online publishers face a dilemma: Allow AI scraping from Google or lose search visibility
On a panel at SIGGRAPH in Denver, Nikola Todorovic (Wonder Dynamics), Freddy Chavez Olmos (Boxel Studio) and Michael Black (Meshcapade) discussed the potential of generative AI and other systems to change — but not necessarily improve — the way media is created today. Their consensus was that while we can justly question the usefulness of these tools in the immediate future, the rate of innovation is such that we should be prepared for radical change at any time beyond that.
Source: Filmmakers say AI will change the art — perhaps beyond recognition