San-Francisco-based startup Story said Wednesday that it raised $80 million of funding for a blockchain designed to prevent artificial intelligence makers like OpenAI from taking creators’ intellectual property without permission. Story said that it raised the funds in a Series B round — typically the third major round of funding in a private startup’s growth journey after seed and Series A — led by Andreessen Horowitz, which is also known as a16z.
Startup using blockchain to prevent copyright theft by AI valued over $2 billion after fresh funding
A new web crawler launched by Meta is quietly scraping the web for AI training data
The crawler, named the Meta External Agent, was launched last month according to three firms that track web scrapers and bots across the web. The automated bot essentially copies, or “scrapes,” all the data that is publicly displayed on websites, for example the text in news articles or the conversations in online discussion groups.
Source: A new web crawler launched by Meta last month is quietly scraping the web for AI training data
AI researchers call for ‘personhood credentials’ as bots get smarter
In a paper, published online last week but not yet peer-reviewed, a group of 32 researchers from OpenAI, Microsoft, Harvard and other institutions call on technologists and policymakers to develop new ways to verify humans without sacrificing people’s privacy or anonymity. They propose a system of “personhood credentials” by which people prove offline that they physically exist as humans.
Source: Analysis | AI researchers call for ‘personhood credentials’ as bots get smarter
Anthropic asks court to ‘prune’ Universal lawsuit to focus on fair use’
In a filing with the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Anthropic – which has received multi-billion-dollar investments from Amazon and Google – asked the court to dismiss three of the four counts brought against it last fall by UMPG, Concord Music Group and ABKCO. Anthropic describes many of the claims against it as “implausible and supported by threadbare and conclusory allegations.”
Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement
A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed “large-scale theft” in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books. While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot.
Source: Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement
AI initiatives would get $40M annually in draft California journalism bill deal
The draft proposal, dated Saturday afternoon, would see California form a public-private partnership with Google and news publishers to fund in-state newsrooms and AI over five years. The partnership would provide over $300 million across five years, including at least $40 million annually for an unspecified “AI Innovation Accelerator” program managed by a “yet-to-be finalized” nonprofit.
Source: AI initiatives would get $40M annually in draft California journalism bill
NVIDIA: Copyrighted Books Are Just Statistical Correlations to Our AI Models
NVIDIA sits front and center of the AI boom. The company provides the much-needed chips and offers its own AI models. NVIDIA admittedly used pirated books to train these models, which triggered a copyright infringement lawsuit. This week, the company informed the court that these claims fall flat, arguing that copyrighted books are nothing more than statistical correlations to its AI models.
Source: NVIDIA: Copyrighted Books Are Just Statistical Correlations to Our AI Models * TorrentFreak
Judge Bars Disney, Warner, Fox From Launching Sports Streamer Venu
U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett in federal court in Manhattan barred the three companies on Friday from launching Venu, deciding that the FuboTV sports streaming service would likely prevail on claims that the new broadband entity would “substantially lessen competition and restrain trade.” Fubo launched in 2015 as a start-up focused on streaming sports programming.
Source: Judge Bars Disney, Warner, Fox From Launching Sports Streamer Venu
How do AI checkers actually work?
AI checkers today use a variety of techniques, starting with text analysis. As with all prompt queries, the submitted text is broken down into tokens and then normalized, removing punctuation and other non-essential indicators. They then use a technique called vectorization, which converts the text into a mathematical hash code for comparison to other text.
Grammarly to roll out a new AI content detector tool. Here's how it works
In this age of artificial intelligence (AI), determining whether text was written by a bot or a person has become increasingly difficult. Several detection products have already popped up — but with decidedly mixed results. Now, Grammarly is kicking off its tool, which it believes will better detect which parts of a document were created by AI versus humans.
Source: Grammarly to roll out a new AI content detector tool. Here’s how it works