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?
Source: Amazon develops video AI model, The Information reports
Nearly three-year-old GoldState just recently confirmed the sizable song-rights purchases (but not the exact value thereof) via its website. Said website also bills Create Music Group as part of GoldState’s growth portfolio; Flexpoint and Goldstuck injected $165 million into Create over the summer, but the corresponding announcement didn’t mention GoldState by name.
Source: GoldState Music Reportedly Buys $200 Million Worth of Music IP
With artificial intelligence at a pivotal moment of development, the federal government is about to transition from one that prioritized AI safeguards to one more focused on eliminating red tape. That’s a promising prospect for some investors but creates uncertainty about the future of any guardrails on the technology, especially around the use of AI deepfakes in elections and political campaigns.
Source: As U.S. government pivots to full Republican control, the outlook is uncertain for AI regulations
The new company, Spines, will charge authors between $1,200 and $5,000 to have their books edited, proofread, formatted, designed and circulated with the help of artificial intelligence, but it’s already cooked up a storm in the book world. Book industry figures have described the team behind a publishing AI startup as “dingbats”, “opportunists” and “extractive capitalists”.
A host of Canadian media companies filed a lawsuit against OpenAI today, alleging “inappropriate and illegal” use of their journalism to power the company’s GPT model, Reuters reports. It’s the latest salvo fired by the media in its fight against AI companies that have scraped large swaths of the open web to train their large-language models.
Canada’s antitrust watchdog alleges that Google acted unlawfully in building market share in the online-advertising business. In a notice filed Thursday with Canada’s Competition Tribunal, the watchdog—known as the Competition Bureau—said it seeks to “put a decisive end to Google’s structural dominance and anticompetitive practice, [and] restore competition” in the country’s online-advertising marketplace.
Source: Canada Sues Google, Alleging Anticompetitive Online-Ad Practices