The action states that, beginning in March 2024, Spotify asserted that its Premium Individual, Duo, and Family subscription streaming plans were now bundled subscription offerings because those plans now include access to audiobooks. Applying the rate formula applicable to bundled subscription offerings results in a reduction to the service provider revenue that Spotify reports.
Source: Mechanical Licensing Collective Files Lawsuit Against Spotify
Sony Music Group is sending out warnings to what sources say are around 700 AI developers and music streaming services, warning them not to use its content to train AI. These so-called “opt-out” letters, which have been obtained by Variety, state that developers will need explicit permission to use that content and warns that some may already be in violation.
Source: Sony Music Warns AI Developers Not to Use Its Content for Training
The tech giant is rolling out AI-generated answers that displace links to human-written websites. The product, dubbed “Search Generative Experience,” or SGE, directly answers queries with complex, multi-paragraph replies that push links to other websites further down the page, where they’re less likely to be seen. The shift stands to shake the very foundations of the web.
Source: Web publishers brace for carnage as Google adds AI answers
Downtown says that it initially established its partnership with Bank of America in 2022 with a $200 million credit facility to provide artists and rightsholders with advances in exchange “for a short-term share of future royalties”. The company has now expanded its credit facility with BoA by an additional $500 million to boost its capacity to pay advances to indie artists.
Source: Downtown secures $500m credit agreement from Bank of America for indie artist advances
TikTok already automatically applies an “AI-generated” tag to content on its platform made using TikTok’s AI tools, and that same label will now apply to content created on other platforms. Now, TikTok will detect when images or videos are uploaded to its platform containing metadata tags indicating the presence of AI-generated content and says it’s the first social media platform to support the new Content Credentials.
Source: TikTok is adding an “AI-generated” label to watermarked third-party content
Earlier this year, Spotify released its annual Loud & Clear report which rounded up global royalties data. Now, Spotify has unveiled UK-specific equivalent data. The UK figures include the overarching (royalties generated by UK artists from Spotify exceeded £750M in 2023) and drill down to artist-level (the number of UK artists who generated over £10,000 and £50,000 in royalties from Spotify in 2023 has doubled since 2017).
Source: Spotify reveals UK-specific streaming royalties data
Newly unsealed documents in the class-action lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild against OpenAI show the startup deleted two huge datasets, named “books1” and “books2,” that had been used to train its GPT-3 artificial-intelligence model. Lawyers for the Authors Guild said in court filings that the datasets probably contained “more than 100,000 published books.”
Big technology companies are consuming as much data as possible to become winners in artificial intelligence — but that’s not necessarily what will define winners. Appian CEO Matt Calkins says that ensuring success in the field is “not just about money.” “AI is not a place where money makes more money,” Calkins told CNBC in an interview at its London bureau on Tuesday.
Source: Big Tech is eating as much data as it can to win in AI — but it’s not ‘winner takes all,’ CEO says
The intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and filmmaking has transitioned from mere novelty to a substantial tool within the industry, and this evolution was on full display at the second annual AI Film Festival hosted by Runway AI Inc. in Los Angeles. The event showcased a tenfold increase in submissions, jumping from 300 to 3,000 videos since last year, reflecting a growing interest and investment in AI-driven filmmaking.
Source: AI Film Festival Shows Increasing AI Integration in Filmmaking — AI In Hollywood
Since generative AI is still so new—ChatGPT went public in late 2022 and had 100 million monthly active users within two months—there’s not much uniformity across higher education about if or how students and faculty members should use it to aid in the completion of assignments and research papers. A new study by Ithaka S+R seeks to gain insight into the technology’s potential to transform the production of academic scholarship.
Source: Researchers investigating generative AI and scholarly publishing