OpenAI has completed a deal that values the San Francisco artificial intelligence company at $80 billion or more, nearly tripling its valuation in less than 10 months. The deal is another example of the Silicon Valley deal-making machine pumping money into a handful of companies that specialize in generative A.I. — technology that can generate text, sounds and images on its own.
Source: OpenAI Completes Deal That Values the Company at $80 Billion
The Federal Trade Commission is seeking public comment on a supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking that would prohibit the impersonation of individuals. The proposed rule changes would extend protections of the new rule on government and business impersonation that is being finalized by the Commission today.
Source: FTC Proposes New Protections to Combat AI Impersonation of Individuals
The copyright battle between music publishers and AI developer Anthropic has taken a dramatic turn, with the music publishers alleging that Anthropic intentionally trained its Claude AI chatbot to rip off copyrighted lyrics. “Anthropic’s own training data betrays its understanding that its AI models would be used to search for and provide copyrighted lyrics,” lawyers for Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO stated in a submission filed with a US District Court in Nashville,
Stable Cascade can generate photos and give variations of the exact image it created, or try to increase an existing picture’s resolution. Other text-to-image editing features include inpainting and outpainting, where the model will fill edit only a specific part of the image, as well as canny edge, where users can make a new photo just by using the edges of an existing picture.
Source: Stability AI tries to stay ahead of the pack with a new image-generating AI model
OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot and the still-image generator DALL-E, is among the many companies racing to improve this kind of instant video generator, including start-ups like Runway and tech giants like Google and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram. The technology could speed the work of seasoned moviemakers, while replacing less experienced digital artists entirely.
Source: OpenAI Unveils A.I. That Instantly Generates Eye-Popping Videos
For decades, the main focus of robots.txt was on search engines; you’d let them scrape your site and in exchange they’d promise to send people back to you. Now AI has changed the equation: companies around the web are using your site and its data to build massive sets of training data, in order to build models and products that may not acknowledge your existence at all.
Source: The rise and fall of robots.txt
Apple Music’s moves to increase royalties, by a rate of 10%, for tracks available in Dolby Atmos is being presented by the company as a magnanimous reward; independent labels, however, are reading it as a collective punishment and the opening up of a disquieting two-tier royalties system.
Source: AIM CEO Silvia Montello: Apple Music Atmos royalty change hurts Indies – Music Ally
The AI Act is clear on transparency requirements: Developers of “general-purpose” AI models will have to provide a “detailed summary of the content used for training” in order to “facilitate parties with legitimate interests, including copyright holders, to exercise and enforce their rights.” However, the law is less clear on what constitutes a “general-purpose” AI model: are AI models designed to create music, and trained primarily on music, “general purpose”?
Source: EU AI Act headed for parliamentary vote, with some copyright provisions still unclear
Several authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, have suffered an early loss in their copyright battle against OpenAI. The authors accused OpenAI of using pirated copies of their books to train its models. A California federal court dismissed the vicarious copyright infringement and DMCA violation claims. However, the lawsuit isn’t over yet.
Source: Court Dismisses Authors’ Copyright Infringement Claims Against OpenAI * TorrentFreak
While the tools are often complicated and time consuming, several AI companies provide creators with ways to opt their work out of training. Generative AI models depend on training datasets, and the companies behind them are motivated to avoid restricting those potential data pools. So while they often do allow artists to opt their work out, the process can be crude and labor intensive — especially if you have a sizable catalog of work.