The entertainment giant struck an alliance with TikTok that will have creators on the popular quick-hit video service making shorts tied to characters and stories from Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, FX and more. The resulting pieces from creators who opt-in to the program will be available on both TikTok and on Disney+ in the form of “Verts,” the company’s vertical video products.
Source: Disney, TikTok Strike Content-Sharing Deal Aimed at Boosting Short-Form Programming on Disney+
South Korea‘s largest music copyright collective has ended its ban on registering songs made with artificial intelligence. The Korean Music Copyright Association (KOMCA) will now register AI-assisted works and pay royalties on them, provided a human creator took a substantial part in the writing, composition, or arrangement. The amended rules took effect on Monday (August 3), replacing a ban that had applied since March 24, 2025.
According to Gallup, seven in 10 Americans now say they are somewhat or extremely knowledgeable about AI, up from 64% in 2024. But as familiarity has grown, so has skepticism. More Americans now believe AI does more harm than good, expect it to reduce the number of U.S. jobs over the next decade, and are less likely to trust businesses to use the technology responsibly.
Source: The More Americans Know About AI, the Less They Like It: Gallup
On July 30, nine days after 404 Media’s reporting, ISBNdb added a note to its homepage and an update on its news page about the change. “We’ve seen the recent coverage about a marketing landing page on our site, and we understand the concern it raised. The facts: ISBNdb has never purchased, scanned, or sold a book — for AI training or anything else,” ISBNdb wrote. “We don’t train AI models, and we never have. The page was a test of market interest; no such service was ever brought to life.
Source: Company Offering Printed Books to Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage
The dispute involves Urbanworld, a New York festival that showcases Black and multicultural films, and the Writers Guild of America East, a 6,000-member union that represents movie, television, podcast and digital news writers. In a letter sent to staff and supporters, Urbanworld’s founder, Stacy Spikes, said the guild had “withdrawn its sponsorship and participation in this year’s festival” over his decision to add films made with A.I. tools.
Source: Writers Guild Withdraws Support From Film Festival Over A.I.
AI search is rapidly becoming the default, whether users like it or not. In just a year’s time, Google’s AI-generated answers in search, known as AI Overviews, have gone from appearing in 15% of searches to 43%, according to a new report, driving a shift in how web users consume information online. In a recent analysis of the generative landscape, market intelligence firm Similarweb noted that what began as an AI layer on top of search has become an integral part of the search journey itself.
Source: Google’s AI search is rapidly becoming the default, new data shows
Music streaming company Deezer has been tracking the number of AI-generated tracks uploaded on the platform since last year, and the number has constantly gone up. Today, the company said that AI music now represents more than 50% of downloads. Deezer said that AI-generated track uploads were at a peak in June 2026, representing a monthly average of 90,000 tracks per day.
Source: Music streamer Deezer says more than 50% of daily uploads are AI-generated
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