When Apple won a bidding war in 2021 for the rights to make the action comedy “Wolfs” with George Clooney and Brad Pitt, it did so in part because it promised the stars it would put the movie into a large number of movie theaters. But this month, just six weeks before the film was set to show up in thousands of theaters around the United States, Apple announced a significant change in plans.
Source: Apple Rethinks Its Movie Strategy After a String of Misses
The class action lawsuit filed by several visual artists against AI image and video generation platforms StabilityAI, Midjourney, Runway and DeviantArt moved forward to the discovery stage last week. The lawsuit is one of the first legal challenges to AI platforms to reach this stage and could set the tone for other cases filed against AI companies.
Source: What’s next for artists suing Stability AI and Midjourney
In joint statements published to both companies’ respective websites on Friday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek complain that EU privacy regulations around AI are holding back innovation. Meta, for instance, points out that it has been prevented from being able to train its AI models on public data across Facebook and Instagram because regulators haven’t crafted legislation to address how this should be handled as of yet.
Source: Meta and Spotify CEOs criticize AI regulation in the EU
California will be the first U.S. state to direct millions of dollars from taxpayer money and tech companies to help pay for journalism and AI research under a new deal announced Wednesday. Under the first-in-the-nation agreement, the state and tech companies would collectively pay roughly $250 million over five years to support California-based news organization and create an AI research program.
Source: California announces new deal with tech to fund journalism, AI research
As part of the partnership, content from Vogue, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Wired, Bon Appétit and more will be used within OpenAI products, including ChatGPT and the company’s Search GPT prototype, a new search feature which offers direct links to news stories. The company plans to eventually integrate it directly into ChatGPT.
Source: Condé Nast Inks Multiyear OpenAI Deal for Its Magazine Brands
Symphonic Distribution has forged a partnership with AI attribution and license management company, Musical AI, that will allow its users to become part of a licensed dataset used in AI training. Joining the dataset is a choice that Symphonic users must opt-in to and participating artists can earn additional income for their contribution.
Source: Symphonic Opens Up Catalog to Train AI Models Through Musical AI Partnership
Why haven’t any of Hollywood’s major studios pulled the trigger yet on a licensing deal with the tech giants looking to train their AI models? It turns out there are many reasons. Factors range from considerable legal risks to fears of repeating a grave strategic error Hollywood made in its first dealings with Netflix. But one of the biggest concerns is a simple one: price.
Source: How Much Should AI Giants Pay Hollywood? What Insiders Say Has Stalled Any Licensing Deals
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.
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
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