The possible use of A.I. for authenticating artworks is a topic that has made headlines in recent years but has, so far, had next to no real-world applications within the art market. Last month saw the very earliest signs that this may be changing, with Germann Auction House in Zurich pioneering the use of A.I. authentication to back the sale of three artworks.
Source: Is The Art Market Ready For A.I. Authentication? | Artnet News
A group of organisations representing musicians, authors, visual artists, filmmakers and other creatives have written to the EC’s executive vice-president Henna Virkkunen and commissioner Glenn Micallef to reiterate their key lobbying points on AI. The letter outlines some of the gaps they see in current legislation – for example the ability for rightsholders to reserve their rights when it comes to AI training – and calls for further steps beyond this year’s EU AI Act.
Source: Creative bodies press EC on regulation of AI and copyright
Giving artificial intelligence models consent to use content for training is a “perfect use case” for blockchain technology, according to Avery Ching, co-founder and chief technology officer of Aptos. He highlighted the potential for blockchain to provide clear consent mechanisms for determining whether specific content can be used for AI training.
Source: AI training consent a ‘perfect use case’ for blockchain — Aptos co-founder
Amazon is reaching out to news publishers about opportunities to license their content for the next generation of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, slated to debut next year, Axios has learned. The company plans to debut a new, smarter version of Alexa, using generative AI to power customized responses to real-time user queries about the news.
Source: Amazon eyes news partners for revamped AI Alexa voice assistant
A new report from CISAC, the global umbrella group for authors’ societies, has a sobering prediction: 24% of music creators’ revenue could be taken by generative AI by 2028. The news is almost as bad for creators in the audiovisual industry (TV, film, video, etc.). By 2028, they face a loss of 21% of the income they would have made if generative AI didn’t exist.
Musical AI and Beatoven.ai’s collaborative project, set to launch in the second half of 2025, aims to “ensure rights holders are compensated for every use of their repertoire.” The platform will be built on Beatoven.ai’s technology, training on a catalog of over3 million songs, loops, samples, and sounds. Musical AI will provide data licensing, attribution of generated outputs, and payments to rightsholders.
An Argentine horror-fantasy film called The Witch Game is coming to theaters in the U.S. and UK, but the Spanish-language movie doesn’t rely on subtitles or English speakers to voice the performances. Instead, AI tools will recreate the original actors’ voices and have them speak English. It’s a controversial move as it is an actual instance of the frequent warnings about AI taking people’s jobs.
Source: Would you watch a foreign film dubbed with AI to sound like the original actors?
A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin wanted to determine if audio clips alone are sufficient for AI to understand the visual characteristics of its environment, a skill once thought to be exclusive to humans. The team used generative AI to successfully convert sounds from audio recordings into street-view images.
Source: AI Generates Accurate Images of Streets From Sound Recordings
AI has the power to pump out words in record speed. And already, that’s substantially inflating the book publishing market. Lovers of LLMs are pushing into the traditional publishing system, building their own book-publishing entities. They’re jump-starting their own publishing imprints, and self-publishing books (often slop) on digital marketplaces.
Source: How AI is accelerating—and devaluing—book publishing
Spotify has limited third-party developers’ access to its internal data, sparking speculation that the move is meant to prevent user and music data from being used to train AI models. In a Spotify for Developers blog post, the streaming service announced that third-party developers will no longer be able to access certain kinds of data from Spotify.
Source: Are Spotify’s changes to third-party developer access meant to combat AI scraping?