Technology

AI-generated music is going viral. Should the music industry be worried?

July 21, 2025By rightstech

The quality and originality of AI music have often been criticized, but experts say that as generative AI becomes more sophisticated, it’s becoming harder and harder for the average listener to distinguish between human and machine. ″[The Velvet Sundown]” is much better music than most of what we’ve heard from AI in the past,” Jason Palamara, an assistant professor of music technology at the Herron School of Art and Design, told CNBC.

Source: AI-generated music is going viral. Should the music industry be worried?

Rise of the Machines: Inside Hollywood’s AI Civil War

July 16, 2025By rightstech

Hollywood is currently in the midst of an AI insurgency, though even that noun may not do the moment justice. Though still fragmented, the effort is increasingly looking like a full-on takeover, a Pixar-like artquake that aims to change the provenance of images, the business of production and (not to put too fine a point on it) the language of cinema itself. In response to this ambition, a countermovement has arisen, a prickly resistance to the idea of removing creativity from human hands.

Source: Rise of the Machines: Inside Hollywood’s AI Civil War

Comcast, CAA Invest in ‘Ethical’ AI Video Start-Up Moonvalley in $84 Million Funding Round

July 16, 2025By rightstech

Moonvalley, an AI research company that says it is developing “ethical” foundational AI video models trained exclusively on licensed content, announced $84 million in additional funding led by existing investor General Catalyst. The round includes strategic investments from CAA and Comcast Ventures, as well as AI cloud company CoreWeave.

Source: Comcast, CAA Invest in ‘Ethical’ AI Video Start-Up Moonvalley as Part of $84 Million Funding Round

The Media’s Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work

July 15, 2025By rightstech

Telling journalists they must use AI is not a business strategy. Partnering with AI companies is a business move, but becoming reliant on revenue from tech giants who are creating a machine that duplicates the work you’ve already created is not a smart or sustainable business move, and therefore it is not a smart business strategy.

Source: The Media’s Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work

EU report says GenAI’s ‘fair use’ defense does not compute

July 14, 2025By rightstech

A research paper commissioned by the European Parliament has called for an EU law to pay writers, musicians, and artists whose work has been used to train GenAI models. The study finds the current exception for text-and-data mining (TDM) in EU law “was not designed to accommodate the expressive and synthetic nature of generative AI training, and its application to such systems risks distorting the purpose and limits of EU copyright exceptions.”

Source: EU report says GenAI’s ‘fair use’ defense does not compute

Sci-Hub’s Crypto Coin Aims to Power a New Era of ‘Open’ Science

July 14, 2025By rightstech

Sci-Hub has launched its own SCI token through which it hopes to unlock more paywalled research. The controversial shadow library, which is used by millions of researchers around the globe, sees this as the next step to decentralize science and reward knowledge sharing. Whether this pirate ‘tokenomics’ works in practice has yet to be seen.

Source: Sci-Hub’s Crypto Coin Aims to Power a New Era of ‘Open’ Science * TorrentFreak

The AI Scraping Fight That Could Change the Future of the Web

July 9, 2025By rightstech

Scraping activity has jumped 18% in the past year, according to Cloudflare, an internet services company. The outcome of the copyright fights and technical efforts to curb free scraping could have a seismic impact on the future of the media industry—and the internet at large. Publishers are essentially trying to fence off swaths of the web while AI companies argue that the material they are scraping is fair game.

Source: The AI Scraping Fight That Could Change the Future of the Web

AI video becomes more convincing, rattling creative industry

July 9, 2025By rightstech

Between Luma Labs’ Dream Machine launched in June 2024, OpenAI’s Sora in December, Runway AI’s Gen-4 in March 2025, and Veo 3 in May, the sector has crossed several milestones in just a few months. Lionsgate vice president Michael Burns told New York Magazine about the possibility of using artificial intelligence to generate animated, family-friendly versions from films like the “John Wick” or “Hunger Games” franchises, rather than creating entirely new projects.

Source: AI video becomes more convincing, rattling creative industry

Moonvalley’s ‘ethical’ AI video model for filmmakers is now publicly available

July 9, 2025By rightstech

The team at Moonvalley, a Los Angeles-based AI video-generation startup, doesn’t think you can prompt your way to making a movie. That’s why the company on Tuesday opened up its “3D-aware” model to the public, promising a “hybrid” approach that gives filmmakers more control than other standard text-to-video models.

Source: Moonvalley’s ‘ethical’ AI video model for filmmakers is now publicly available | TechCrunch

AI ‘Band’ the Velvet Sundown Officially Confirm They’re AI — and a ‘Provocation’

July 7, 2025By rightstech

The AI band The Velvet Sundown, who currently have over 900,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, have officially admitted — in a new revision to their Spotify bio — what was obvious to experts and non-experts alike: their music is, in fact, AI-generated. “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence,” the band bio now reads.

Source: AI ‘Band’ the Velvet Sundown Officially Confirm They’re AI — and a ‘Provocation’