Technology

Australian news media could seek payment from Meta for content used to train AI

When Meta announced last week that it would not sign new deals to pay for news in Australia for use on Facebook, it downplayed the value of news to its services, stating that just 3% of Facebook usage in Australia was related to news. There are now calls to designate Meta under the news media bargaining code, which would force the company to negotiate with news media publishers and pay for news content on its platforms.

Source: Australian news media could seek payment from Meta for content used to train AI

Midjourney Accuses Stability AI of Image Theft, Bans Its Employees

While DALL-E developer OpenAI is busy fighting with Elon Musk, the creators of two other notable image generation AIs, Midjourney and Stability AI, seem to have sparked a beef of their own over the most ironic thing imaginable, considering the nature of the companies involved – image theft. It is claimed that employees from Stability AI infiltrated Midjourney’s database and stole all prompt and image pairs, an action that also caused a 24-hour outage.

Source: Midjourney Accuses Stability AI of Image Theft, Bans Its Employees

Europe Enters New Era of Tech Regulation With Digital Markets Act

It will be months, if not years, before the usefulness and the unintended consequences of the EU legislation will become clear, but already the DMA has forced tech giants, from Alphabet to TikTok, to change how they operate in the EU or face the threat of hefty fines. First-time DMA offenders can be penalized up to 10 percent of their company’s total worldwide turnover.

Source: Europe Enters New Era of Tech Regulation With Digital Markets Act

Anything That Can Be Made With AI Will Be, In Hollywood

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, generative AI is now everywhere in the media and rights-based industries. It’s writing news articles and fan-fic e-books, it’s making music, it’s creating artwork. But no creative industry will be transformed by AI quite as much as movie and television production. The reason has as much to do with economics as technology.

Warner Bros.’ “Dune: Part Two” opened to a whopped $81.5 million domestically over the weekend, and $97 million internationally. It brought a welcome boost to theaters, which had seen the number of butts in seats come crashing down from the summer’s “Barbenheimer” high. And it showed that big-budget, effects-driven spectacles can still deliver for a studio, especially if they’re spectacular enough to justify release on large-format screens, like IMAX, which carry a premium ticket price and accounted for 48% of “Dune’s” domestic tally.

Researchers tested leading AI models for copyright infringement. GPT-4 performed worst

Patronus AI on Wednesday released research showcasing how often leading AI models produce copyrighted content. “We pretty much found copyrighted content across the board, across all models that we evaluated, whether it’s open source or closed source,” Rebecca Qian, Patronus AI’s cofounder and CTO, said. “Perhaps what was surprising is that we found that OpenAI’s GPT-4 produced copyrighted content on 44% of prompts that we constructed.”

Source: Researchers tested leading AI models for copyright infringement using popular books, and GPT-4 performed worst

OpenAI says Musk wanted to merge with Tesla or take control

OpenAI said Wednesday it intends to dismiss all claims made by Elon Musk in a recent lawsuit and suggested that the billionaire entrepreneur didn’t really have that much impact on its development and success. In a blog post, the Microsoft-backed startup revealed that since its inception in 2015, it had raised less than $45 million from Musk, despite his initial commitment to provide as much as $1 billion in funding. “Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,” OpenAI wrote.

Source: OpenAI says Musk only ever contributed $45 million, wanted to merge with Tesla or take control | TechCrunch

The EU’s new competition rules are going live — here’s how tech giants are responding

The EU has designated six companies as gatekeepers, which it defines as large digital platforms providing “core” services like app stores, search engines, and web browsers. The DMA’s restrictions apply to specific services within these companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. Here’s what each has been doing to meet — and fight — those demands.

Source: The EU’s new competition rules are going live — here’s how tech giants are responding

The AI bassist: Sony’s vision for a new paradigm in music production

In a recent paper posted on the arXiv preprint server, researcher Marco Pasini and his colleagues Stefan Lattner and Maarten Grachten at Sony CSL, introduced a new latent diffusion model that can create realistic and effective bass accompaniments for musical tracks. Diffusion models are deep learning techniques that can learn to generate images, audio or other samples that capture the overall structure underlying a dataset.

Source: The AI bassist: Sony’s vision for a new paradigm in music production

Media Insider: Will AI Wipe Out The Canadian Film And TV industry?

The ability of Canadian locations to stand in for American ones is a critical element in our own movie and TV industry. It brings billions of production dollars north of the 49th parallel. But if it suddenly becomes cheaper to stay in L.A. and use AI to create your location, rather than physically move to a “stand-in” location, our film and TV industry will dry up almost instantly.

Source: Media Insider: Will AI Wipe Out The Canadian Film And TV industry?

Disney Working to Get Streaming Platforms on Technical Par With Netflix, Iger Says

Disney CEO Bob Iger acknowledged the company is behind Netflix in terms of technical capabilities — and that it’s in the process of catching up. “When we launched Disney+ in 2019, our goal was to have basically robust video experiences at scale,” Iger said. “What we didn’t have was the technology that we needed to basically lower customer acquisition and retention cost, to essentially grow our margins by reducing marketing expenses.”

Source: Disney Working to Get Streaming Platforms on Technical Par With Netflix, Iger Says: ‘We Need to Be at Their Level’

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