It may be a real-life case of AI coming to take our jobs—if not our identities. Journalist, author, and professor Jane Friedman reported on Monday that Amazon has refused her request to remove books falsely attributed to her from its website, in part because she did not hold a trademark to her own name.
Source: Amazon Won’t Remove Books Listed Under a Real Author’s Name But Allegedly Written With AI – Decrypt
From college plagiarism to cybercrime scams, generative AI is eroding trust in online content. Digital watermarking is no quick fix for the problem. Watermarking “is pretty much one of the few technical alternatives that we have available,” says Florian Kerschbaum, a computer scientist specializing in data security at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. “On the other hand, the outcome of this technology is not as certain as one might believe. We cannot really predict what level of reliability we’ll be able to achieve.”
Source: Tech Companies’ New Favorite Solution for the AI Content Crisis Isn’t Enough
The Walt Disney Company has formed a task force to investigate the potential applications of AI throughout its various business units, reports Reuters, including cutting costs and enhancing customer experiences. This comes despite ongoing Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes that have put some AI technologies in the crosshairs.
Almost two-thirds of American adults said they thought entertainment unions were justified in making AI a centerpiece of their negotiating demands. “This is [not just] a Hollywood phenomenon,” said Greg Cross, chief executive of the AI avatar startup Soul Machines. “AI is literally eating the world.”
Source: Actors and writers aren’t the only ones worried about AI, new polling shows
The technology has the potential to affect nearly every aspect of how books are produced — even the act of writing itself. “The entire marketplace is going to be affected,” said Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the Authors Guild. “I wouldn’t be surprised if A.I. got pretty good at some kinds of genre fiction in the not too distant future.”
Source: A.I.’s Inroads in Publishing Touch Off Fear, and Creativity
Not every use-case of the emerging technology involves generating computer-made songs or voices instantaneously. While some applications of AI certainly present urgent legal and ethical concerns, there are also many applications that give musicians and rights holders new creative opportunities from the way it’s created to how it’s released and beyond.
On August 9, a collection of 3,000 non-fungible tokens or NFTs of music superstar Elvis Presley will be released on The Sandbox metaverse to honor the legacy of the iconic musician. Each NFT will showcase a moment from Presley’s career, highlighting signature sartorial choices, haircuts, and dance moves that fans of the beloved legend can memorialize through digital collectibles.
The AudioCraft family of AI models can produce high-quality audio with long-term consistency—something current music AI generation models lack. Meta says it has simplified the overall design of generative models for audio compared to prior work in the field, while giving people the full recipe for people to play with its existing models.
Source: Meta Introduces AudioCraft — An AI Text-to-Audio Generator
As the debate over artificial intelligence-generated tracks intensifies, and concerns about ethical usage of artists’ voices in AI creations persist, Arpeggi Labs has created an AI voice cloning and licensing platform backed by Steve Aoki, Lionel Richie and Wyclef Jean that has now achieved over 1 million audio clip conversions in just weeks since its launch.
In recent years, AI has found its way into the hands of independent artists. A study by digital music company Believe and its subsidiary, TuneCore, has found that AI is in an “early and rapid adoption phase” among indie artists. Believe and TuneCore have conducted a survey of close to 1,600 self-releasing artists from over 10 countries.
Source: 27% of indie artists have used AI music tools, according to TuneCore study