Cloudflare, a cloud infrastructure provider that serves 20% of the web, announced Tuesday the launch of a new marketplace that reimagines the relationship between website owners and AI companies — ideally giving publishers greater control over their content. It’s called Pay per Crawl, and Cloudflare is launching the “experiment” in private beta on Tuesday.
Source: Cloudflare launches a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping | TechCrunch
Outlaw country artist Aventhis is verified on Spotify – where just over a million (1.072M) listeners absorb his work each month. He’s even popular enough to have one of those official Spotify-generated ‘THIS IS… Aventhis’ playlists under his name. And his music? It’s gaining traction, with the blues-soaked, 2025-released Mercy On My Graver racking up more than 2 million plays. Aventhis isn’t real. Neither is his voice. He, and it, are both AI-generated.
Source: The AI music problem on Spotify (and other streaming platforms) is worse than you think
The battle between technology heavyweights and many of the country’s most famous creative companies and artists is playing out in Washington and in court. At stake are billions of dollars and precedents that could shape the future of AI and U.S. copyright law. While the fight is far from over, some in creative industries fear it might be too late to stop the advance of AI as it roils their professions.
Source: Hollywood Confronts AI Copyright Chaos in Washington, Courts
The tool called ‘Sessions,’ available to Standard and Pro-tier subscribers, allows users to manipulate song structures by moving, extending or replacing sections within tracks. Udio explains in a press release that Sessions automatically identifies musical elements like choruses and bridges from audio waveforms, allowing for the editing of lyrics and sound through a “visual workstation”.
Source: Udio, still battling copyright lawsuit from music majors, launches AI ‘visual editing workstation’
An open letter from authors calls on book publishers to pledge to limit their use of AI tools, for example by committing to only hire human audiobook narrators. The letter argues that authors’ work has been “stolen” by AI companies: “Rather than paying writers a small percentage of the money our work makes for them, someone else will be paid for a technology built on our unpaid labor.”
Source: Authors call on publishers to limit their use of AI | TechCrunch
Getty Images dropped its primary claims of copyright infringement against Stability AI on Wednesday at London’s High Court, narrowing one of the most closely watched legal fights over how AI companies use copyrighted content to train their models. Getty sued Stability AI — the startup behind AI image generator Stable Diffusion — in January 2023 after alleging that Stability used millions of copyrighted images to train its AI model without permission.
Source: Getty drops key copyright claims against Stability AI, but UK lawsuit continues | TechCrunch
The use of copyrighted works to train models is at the heart of a bitter battle between tech companies and content creators. That battle is playing out in technical arguments about what does and doesn’t count as fair use of a copyrighted work. But it is ultimately about carving out a space in which human and machine creativity can continue to coexist.
A new study by scholars from MIT and Wellesley, titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,” set up a months-long comparative experiment that measured the brains and essays of some student writers, and found that AI users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Not only that, but the negative effects of using AI remained measurable in the participants afterwards, and even when they were doing their thinking without LLMs.
Source: Meta’s AI Model ‘Memorized’ Huge Chunks of Books, Including ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘1984’
The latest salvo came in early April, when user nyuuzyou scraped 12.6 million fanfics from the online repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) and uploaded the dataset to Hugging Face, a company that hosts open-source AI models and software. Nyuuzyou’s upload was quickly discovered by the Reddit community r/AO3, where hundreds of users posted furious reactionsFanfic writers flooded the comment section of the dataset on Hugging Face, getting into arguments with AI defenders.