From AI‑generated product shots slipping into online catalogs, to manipulated photos influencing legal disputes, the trustworthiness of visual content has never been more in question. In an environment where seeing is no longer believing, brands, media organizations, and cultural institutions can no longer afford to ignore the issue of content authenticity.
Source: Introducing the Authenticity & Content Provenance Maturity Model – Kaptur
Universal Pictures is taking a new approach to combat mass theft of its movies to teach artificial intelligence systems. Starting in June with How to Train Your Dragon, the studio has attached a legal warning at the end credits of its films stating that their titles “may not be used to train AI.” It’s also appeared on Jurassic World Rebirth and Bad Guys 2.
Source: Universal Pictures to Big Tech: We’ll Sue If You Steal Our Movies For AI
Midjourney responded to a lawsuit from Disney and Universal, arguing that the studios cannot stop AI training and cannot ‘have it both ways’ on AI. “Copyright law does not confer absolute control over the use of copyrighted works,” Midjourney’s lawyers argued. “The limited monopoly granted by copyright must give way to fair use, which safeguards countervailing public interests in the free flow of ideas and information.”
Source: Midjourney Says Disney Cannot Prevent AI Training and Wants to ‘Have It Both Ways’
Perplexity published a response to Cloudflare’s claims that it disrespects robots.txt and engages in stealth crawling. Perplexity argues that Cloudflare is mischaracterizing AI Assistants as web crawlers, saying that they should not be subject to the same restrictions since they are user-initiated assistants. According to Perplexity, its system does not store or index content ahead of time. Instead, it fetches webpages only in response to specific user questions.
Source: Perplexity Says Cloudflare Is Blocking Legitimate AI Assistants
The commission, in its interim report into “harnessing data and the digital economy”, used copyright as a case study for how Australia’s existing regulatory framework could be adapted to manage the risks of artificial intelligence. A key recommendation was that the federal government should conduct a sweeping review of regulations to plug potential gaps that could be exploited by “bad actors” using AI.
The opt-in agreement between Kobalt and $3.3 billion-valued Eleven Labs establishes what sources describe as “parity” between publishing and recorded music revenues. Each side will receive an approximate 50/50 split of royalties generated from the AI platform. Eleven Music’s basic tier is trained on production music, but a forthcoming ‘Eleven Music Pro’ offering will soon be trained on cleared catalog from Kobalt and Merlin.
The AI audio-generation unicorn ElevenLabs announced the launch of a new model that allows users to generate music that’s cleared for commercial use. This move marks ElevenLabs’ expansion beyond its main focus thus far in its three years of existence, which has been building AI audio tools. ElevenLabs is a leader among companies making text-to-speech AI products, and it has expanded into conversational bots and tools that translate speech into other languages.
J.B. MacKinnon of Vancouver has filed class action lawsuits against Anthropic, Databricks, Meta, and Nvidia, alleging they illegally used copyrighted works by Canadian writers to train their large language models. The lawsuit claims MacKinnon’s books were part of a 196,640-book dataset that Nvidia used without securing licensing fees or author consent. “The models were entirely built on the mining of copyrighted work,” MacKinnon told the CBC.
Source: Canadian Author Sues Four AI Companies for Copyright Infringement
A deepfake Dwayne Johnson is just one part of a broader technological earthquake hitting Hollywood. Studios are scrambling to figure out simultaneously how to use AI in the filmmaking process and how to protect themselves against it. While executives see a future where the technology shaves tens of millions of dollars off a movie’s budget, they are grappling with a present filled with legal uncertainty.
Source: Is It Still Disney Magic if It’s AI?
Leading music funding platform beatBread has announced securing an additional $124 million in credit and equity capital as it continues to scale. The company will use the capital to expand its sales, marketing, and product operations, while providing more flexible funding to artists, writers, and independent label clients. Strategic investors who took part include Citi, Deciens Capital, Mucker Capital, and Advantage Capital.
Source: Music Funding Platform beatBread Secures $124M in Latest Round