The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) has sent a letter to Judiciary Committee leadership in both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, asking for the overhaul of the statutory license in section 115 of the Copyright Act, which “prevents private negotiations in a free market” for mechanical royalty rates for songwriters and music publishers in the U.S.
Source: NMPA Calls on Congress for Copyright Act Overhaul Amid Spotify Battle Over Bundling
Source: Hollywood agency CAA aims to help stars manage their own AI likenesses
OpenAI has signed a deal for access to real-time content from Reddit’s data API, which means it can surface discussions from the site within ChatGPT and other new products. It’s an agreement similar to the one Reddit signed with Google earlier this year that was reportedly worth $60 million. The deal will also “enable Reddit to bring new AI-powered features to Redditors and mods” and use OpenAI’s large language models to build applications
Source: Reddit’s deal with OpenAI will plug its posts into “ChatGPT and new products”
For every project that has faced blowback for using AI in some part of the production pipeline, there are dozens more that have quietly adopted the technology. “There are tons of people who are using AI, but they can’t admit it publicly because you still need artists for a lot of work and they’re going to turn against you,” says David Stripinis, a VFX industry veteran.
Source: Hollywood at a Crossroads: “Everyone Is Using AI, But They Are Scared to Admit It”
It’s believed to the first lawsuit against an AI firm over the use of likenesses to train an AI system and marks a growing rift between creators and companies alleged to indiscriminately hoover troves of data to power their technology. The lawsuit seeks to represent other voiceover artists who believe their voices were misappropriated by LOVO.
Source: Actors Hit AI Startup With Class Action Lawsuit Over Voice Theft
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n a collaboration with YouTube and some artists, songwriters, and producers, Google has developed a suite of music AI tools it is calling Music AI Sandbox. Google says the new tools are designed to “open a new playground for creativity” and giving people a way to create instrumental sections from scratch with no prior music knowledge needed.
ChatGPT will tell you that the news is factual, includes language variation and cultural awareness, comprises complex sentence structures, includes quotes that convey real-world conversations, excels at summarization and condensation. In fact, the news is so valuable to this endeavor that it makes up half of the top 10 sites incorporated into one of Google’s datasets that is being used to train some of the most popular large language models.
Source: The Battle Over Using Journalism to Build AI Models is Just Starting | Nieman Reports
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