When Apple won a bidding war in 2021 for the rights to make the action comedy “Wolfs” with George Clooney and Brad Pitt, it did so in part because it promised the stars it would put the movie into a large number of movie theaters. But this month, just six weeks before the film was set to show up in thousands of theaters around the United States, Apple announced a significant change in plans.
Source: Apple Rethinks Its Movie Strategy After a String of Misses
In joint statements published to both companies’ respective websites on Friday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek complain that EU privacy regulations around AI are holding back innovation. Meta, for instance, points out that it has been prevented from being able to train its AI models on public data across Facebook and Instagram because regulators haven’t crafted legislation to address how this should be handled as of yet.
Source: Meta and Spotify CEOs criticize AI regulation in the EU
California will be the first U.S. state to direct millions of dollars from taxpayer money and tech companies to help pay for journalism and AI research under a new deal announced Wednesday. Under the first-in-the-nation agreement, the state and tech companies would collectively pay roughly $250 million over five years to support California-based news organization and create an AI research program.
Source: California announces new deal with tech to fund journalism, AI research
In a paper, published online last week but not yet peer-reviewed, a group of 32 researchers from OpenAI, Microsoft, Harvard and other institutions call on technologists and policymakers to develop new ways to verify humans without sacrificing people’s privacy or anonymity. They propose a system of “personhood credentials” by which people prove offline that they physically exist as humans.
Source: Analysis | AI researchers call for ‘personhood credentials’ as bots get smarter
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
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
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’
Prediction marketplace Polymarket, which lets users bet on real-world events, is partnering with AI-powered search engine Perplexity to display news summaries of events. When users click on an event on Polymarket, they will now see a summary of news related to the event based on search results from Perplexity. There’s also a search box that you can use to ask more questions.
Source: Prediction marketplace Polymarket partners with Perplexity to show news summaries
The parade of second quarter earnings reports for major showbiz conglomerates made it crystal-clear that there is no more avoiding the 800-pound gorilla on the balance sheets of Big Media. It’s been a long time coming that the valuations long applied to old-fashioned cable channels have to be slashed by double digits.
Source: Hot August Write-Downs: Big Media Can’t Hide From Hard Decisions on Cable Valuations Any More