According to the announcement from UK-headquartered Cutting Edge today (April 15), the new funds will be used for a combination of “corporate purposes” and the acquisition of music rights across the film, TV, theatre, gaming, and wellness spaces. Cutting Edge said it has already identified a “circa USD $1.5 billion pipeline” of potential investments.
Source: Cutting Edge Group secures $500m to fund music rights acquisitions
We ought to heed the warning that technology evolves in uncertain ways. However, there is one class of AI risk that is generally knowable in advance. These are risks stemming from misalignment between a company’s economic incentives to profit from its proprietary AI model in a particular way and society’s interests in how the AI model should be monetised and deployed.
Source: To understand the risks posed by AI, follow the money
Though it still requires ratification by SAG-AFTRA members, the deal is a significant development for recording artists as it establishes safeguards for what the union calls “ethical and responsible treatment” in the use of artificial intelligence technology. The deal requires “clear and conspicuous consent” for the use of an artist’s voice in AI-generated content, along with minimum compensation levels, and details of the intended use of the AI replica.
Source: SAG-AFTRA strikes new deal with major labels on sound recordings, including protections for AI use
The UK Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) committee issued a report on Wednesday (April 10) calling for a number of new policies, aimed at ensuring better compensation for people working in creative industries. One recommendation sure to get the attention of the music industry is a change to the split in streaming royalties between recorded music and music publishing.
Tech companies have scraped vast swathes of the web to gather the data they claim is needed to create generative AI—with little regard for content creators, copyright laws, or privacy. On top of this, increasingly, firms with reams of people’s posts are looking to get in on the AI gold rush by selling or licensing that information. Looking at you, Reddit.
The federal government is trying to promote efforts to counter so-called audio deepfakes by awarding four organizations prizes for developing technologies to distinguish between authentic human speech and audio generated by artificial intelligence. The prizes, awarded Monday by the Federal Trade Commission, come as the agency has issued warnings to consumers about scams using AI-generated voices and as concerns grow about the influence of deepfakes on this year’s elections.
Source: The FTC announced winners of a contest to tell real voices from deepfake audio
A new movement of AI labeling is rising despite OpenAI dropping watermarking due to low accuracy (26%). Instead of labeling content themselves, which seems futile, big tech (Google, YouTube, Meta, and TikTok) pushes users to label AI content with a carrot/stick approach. Google uses a double-pronged approach to fight AI spam in search: prominently showing forums like Reddit, where content is most likely created by humans, and penalties.
Earlier this year, Getty filed suit in London against Stability AI claiming the open-source generative AI company unlawfully copied and processed millions of Getty’s copyright-protected images. But the stock images giant is trying to be proactive as well, signing a deal with AI giant Nvidia to create AI text-to-image and text-to-video services with a generative model trained on Getty’s copyright-protected library of stock images.
Source: Getty Images CEO Calls for Industry Standards Around AI
OpenAI, Google, and the French artificial intelligence startup Mistral have all released new versions of their frontier AI models within 12 hours of one another, as the industry prepares for a burst of activity over the summer. The unprecedented flurry of releases come as the sector readies for the expected launch of the next major version of GPT, the system that underpins OpenAI’s hit chatbot Chat-GPT.
Source: AI race heats up as OpenAI, Google and Mistral release new models
Streaming fraud is one of the industry’s biggest challenges — but some artists are having their music removed from DSPs for fraud they didn’t commit. TuneCore CEO Andreea Gleason and VP of Artist Support Erica Clayton revealed the pressure they were under from streaming services, which led them to implement these admittedly aggressive policies.