Technology

The Federation of European Publishers issued a statement Wednesday welcoming the European Parliament’s approval of legislation known as Europe’s AI Act.  “While AI offers great opportunities, including for the publishing industry, it also raises serious concerns, particularly in the field of copyright and transparency. The AI Act marks the first attempt in the world to define dedicated rules for AI, to ensure that this technology can develop without harming society.”

Source: European Publishers Welcome Parliament’s ‘AI Act’ Draft Approval

The US’s most prominent performance-rights organization is planning information sessions and a 12-week “challenge” to build new AI music technologies. “Our members are telling us that they want ASCAP to help them navigate technology disruption, advocate for better regulation in AI and pursue compensation if their music is used in AI-generated content,” Lehman said in a statement.

Source: ASCAP unveils initiatives around AI to ‘help music creators navigate the future while protecting their work’

Stockholm-based audio publisher Storytel has announced what it describes as an exclusive partnership with software provider ElevenLabs, based in Brooklyn, New York. ElevenLabs, established last year, says that it develops text-to-speech models that use high compression and what the company describes as “context understanding” to simulate human speech.

Source: ‘AI Voices’ in Audiobooks: Storytel in ElevenLabs Partnership

The European Union’s Parliament voted to push forward draft legislation that is positioned to be the West’s first comprehensive set of AI regulations. Under the rules, companies would also need to design their AI models in a way that prevents them from creating illegal content, and they would be required to publish summaries of the copyrighted data used to train their models.

Source: AI Regulation Is Here. Almost.

Source: Sir Paul McCartney says artificial intelligence has enabled a ‘final’ Beatles song

The New York Times and NBC News are among the organizations holding preliminary talks with other media companies, large technology platforms and Digital Content Next, the industry’s digital news trade organization, to develop rules around how their content can be used by natural language artificial intelligence tools, according to people familiar with the matter.

Source: A.I. poses new threats to newsrooms, and they’re taking action

Artificial intelligence is not new to classical music. But its recent, rapid developments have composers worried, and intrigued. R.A.V.E. is an example of machine learning, a specific category of artificial intelligence technology that musicians have experimented with since the 1990s — but that now is defined by rapid development, the arrival of publicly available, A.I.-powered music tools.

Source: What Happens When A.I. Enters the Concert Hall

Can you tell the difference between a Drake original and a track featuring an AI-generated voice? AI platforms are able to learn from vocals and original music content that is given to it by humans and then “ingested”, according to Universal Music Group. It says the AI now is so advanced that it can recreate melodies and voices within seconds.

Source: ‘Regulate it before we’re all finished’: Musicians react to AI songs flooding the internet

OpenAI has no plans to leave Europe, CEO Sam Altman said on Friday, reversing a threat made earlier this week to leave the region if it becomes too hard to comply with upcoming laws on artificial intelligence. “We are excited to continue to operate here and of course have no plans to leave,” Altman said in a tweet on Friday. His threat of quitting Europe had drawn criticism from EU industry chief Thierry Breton and a host of other lawmakers.

Source: ChatGPT-maker OpenAI says has no plans to leave Europe