Vinyl, CDs, and cassettes remain exempt from U.S. tariffs, but the likes of Bandcamp are addressing impacts on shipping, merch, and more. Notwithstanding the exception for vinyl and CDs, Discogs has warned that “customs and postal carriers may experience delays or mistakes as they adjust to the new requirements.” (Other national carriers are said to have paused U.S. deliveries altogether.)
Source: Vinyl & CDs Remain Exempt from Tariffs — Merch Subject to Duties
Fake books. Made-up sources. Bogus trampoline bunnies. We’re all getting a lot of AI-generated content in our feeds these days. But a new working paper suggests there’s a silver lining for trusted news organizations: they may be able to benefit from the broader degradation of the information ecosystem and win over subscribers concerned about sifting through the slop on their own.
Source: Trusted news sites may benefit in an internet full of AI-generated fakes, a new study finds
More than eight in ten people have claimed they still click on a website link after reading an AI Overview in Google search results. Some 13.3% of people claimed to do so every time, 30.5% said they often do, 41.5% said they sometimes do and 10.3% said they rarely click through. The findings came in a survey of 1,000 US adults carried out via Pollfish for digital marketing agency NP Digital.
Source: Survey suggests readers still click on links after reading Google AI Overview
A On Friday, a proposed class action was filed in Washington federal court against Amazon over a “bait and switch” in which the company allegedly misleads consumers into believing they’ve purchased content when they’re only getting a license to watch, which can be revoked at any time.
Source: You Don’t Actually Own That Movie You Just “Bought.” A New Class Action Lawsuit Targets Amazon
When Runway ML started in 2018, the company’s founders envisioned using AI to aid in the creation of art. The company’s AI models were among the first to generate synthetic video for movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once. But as Runway’s models have improved, they’ve begun to do something unexpected: model the laws of physics simply by observing two-dimensional video.
Source: The new Hollywood: Runway’s AI models edge closer to simulating reality
The “tsunami” of AI use cases and the risks for creators and copyright protections that it brings with it were in the spotlight at the CineLink industry section of the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival on Thursday. “Everybody’s using AI, and I’m wondering how much this AI super brain is giving directions on creativity.”
Source: The European Union Is Trying to Build Guardrails on AI. Experts Say It Hasn’t Gone Far Enough
Sixteen of the 50 biggest news websites in the UK are now using a “consent or pay” model to allow users to pay to reject personalised advertising or even avoid ads altogether. UK publishers began to implement the model last year as the Information Commissioner’s Office cracked down on the requirement for the biggest sites to display a “reject all cookies” button as prominently as the option to “accept all”.
Source: More UK news publishers are adopting ‘consent or pay’ advertising model
AI has become an expert forger of human patterns. These models are trained on gigantic libraries of human-made art. They have analyzed more paintings, songs, and photographs than any person ever could. These models may not have a soul, but they have learned the mathematical recipe for what we find beautiful or catchy.
Source: AI passed the aesthetic Turing Test, raising big questions for art
The audio and video of a recent film, Watch the Skies, a Swedish sci-fi film, was fed into a digital tool called DeepEditor. It manipulates the video to make it look like actors are genuinely speaking the language the film is made into. The English version of Watch The Skies was released in 110 AMC Theatres across the US in May. “To contextualise this result, if the film were not dubbed into English, the film would never have made it into US cinemas in the first place,” says Mr Cottray.
AI’s appetite for scraped content, without returning readers, is leaving site owners and content creators fighting for survival. Both search and AI use the results of absolutely ginormous scraping and spidering operations, but one provides benefits to the scrapees, while the other profits enormously from the work of others while simultaneously destroying their motivation to keep doing the work.
Source: How web scraping actually works – and why AI changes everything