As streaming dominates home entertainment, with 59.6 million U.S. households cutting the cord per Evoca.tv, the physical media market for DVDs and Blu-rays has seen a dramatic fall over the past decade. New data reveals that combined DVD and Blu-ray sales in the U.S. dropped from $10.1 billion in 2014 to an estimated $900 million in 2024, a decline of over 91%.
Source: DVD & Blu-ray Sales Have Dropped 90% Since 2014 As Streaming Grows | Cord Cutters News
Wikipedia is attempting to dissuade artificial intelligence developers from scraping the platform by releasing a dataset that’s specifically optimized for training AI models. The Wikimedia Foundation announced on Wednesday that it had partnered with Kaggle — a Google-owned data science community platform that hosts machine learning data — to publish a beta dataset of “structured Wikipedia content in English and French.”
Source: Wikipedia is giving AI developers its data to fend off bot scrapers
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says the world is three to five years away from “artificial general intelligence” that will be equal to, if not better, than any human thinkers or creators today. It’s a prediction that, if true, could have tremendous consequences for music and other creative industries. “What happens when every single one of us has the equivalent of the smartest human [working] on every problem in our pocket?” he asked.
Los Angeles-based Pex, an audio content identification platform, has been acquired. Pex’s new owner is a company called Vobile, which offers digital content protection and transaction services for entertainment companies, platforms, sports leagues, music labels, and publishers. Vobile has confirmed that Pex COO Amadea Choplin has joined the company as Head of Music Business, while founder Rasty Turek, formerly CEO, will act as a consultant to Vobile going forward.
Source: Pex acquired by copyright protection and content monetization company Vobile
The strongest argument artists can make is that the unfettered advance of AI technologies that experts can neither understand nor control won’t greatly benefit humanity on balance — it’ll harm us. And for that reason, forcing artists to be complicit in the creation of those technologies is inflicting something terrible on them: moral injury. Moral injury is what happens when you feel you’ve been forced to violate your own values.
Source: The real argument artists should be making against AI
The BBC’s recent study into AI-generated news summaries is a sobering reminder of the potential and profound limitations of generative AI. While artificial intelligence is often lauded as the inevitable next step in media evolution, the findings from this trial expose a more unsettling truth: AI, in its current form, is incapable of reliably processing and presenting accurate news.
Deepfake detection and takedown service Loti AI has secured an additional $16.2 million in series A funding led by Khosla Ventures with additional investments from FUSE, Bling Capital, and Ensemble. This brings the startup’s total raised to date to $23 million. Loti AI is working to drive development and market expansion of its likeness protection technology, which initially launched for public figures and celebrities.
Source: Deepfake Detection Startup Loti AI Secures Additional $16.2 Million in Series A Funding
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton are challenging one of AI development’s accepted core beliefs – that the more pre-training data the better the performance. As reported by HPCwire, a new paper discuses the concept of “catastrophic overtraining,” whereby extended pre-training can harm a model’s performance after fine-tuning.
Late last month, Hollo, a conversational AI company, and Realbotix, which makes customizable humanoid robots, unveiled a version of the late actress. This synthetic twin is designed to mimic Suzanne Somers’ voice, personality and facial expressions. It’s loaded with a database of her performances. Alan Hamel, her widower and partner in buying and popularizing ThighMaster, claimed that they discussed this kind of idea before her death.
Source: Eternal Celebrities: The Multi-Billion Opportunity Coming
The Internet Engineering Task Force has chartered a group it hopes will create a standard that lets content creators tell AI developers whether it’s OK to use their work. Named the AI Preferences Working Group (AIPREF), the AIPREF charter suggests “attaching preferences to content either by including preferences in content metadata or by signaling preferences using the protocol that delivers content” as the ways to get this done.
Source: IETF building tech to tell AI scrapers what authors want