Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hinted that banning TikTok in the European Union is an option, during a debate this evening in Maastricht, featuring parties’ lead candidates for the bloc’s 2024 election. “It is not excluded,” von der Leyen said, after the moderator referred to the United States, where TikTok faces a national ban unless it is sold by its owner, ByteDance.
Source: TikTok ban in EU is ‘not excluded,’ von der Leyen says
British antitrust authorities are reviewing partnerships between tech giants and smaller AI developers, citing concerns about competition. This inquiry could reshape the AI industry’s landscape. Some experts warned that a strict antitrust ruling may not only alter how major corporations interact with emerging AI firms but could also dampen enthusiasm for new partnerships, possibly stalling the pace of innovation.
Source: As British Regulators Scrutinize Microsoft and Amazon AI Deals, Industry Braces for Impact
While the newspapers’ publishers have spent billions of dollars to send “real people to real places to report on real events in the real world,” the two tech firms are “purloining” the papers’ reporting without compensation “to create products that provide news and information plagiarized and stolen,” according to the lawsuit in federal court.
Source: Mercury News and other papers sue Microsoft, OpenAI over the new artificial intelligence
The National Institute of Standards and Technology today announced it’s launching a new initiative called NIST GenAI aimed at assessing generative artificial intelligence models and create systems that can identify AI=created text, images and videos. The launch of the new program came as NIST revealed its first draft publications on AI risks and standards.
Source: NIST announces new initiative to create systems that can detect AI-generated content – SiliconANGLE
Google has been hit with a new copyright lawsuit in California federal court by a group of visual artists who claimed the Alphabet opens new tab unit used their work without permission to train Imagen, its artificial-intelligence powered image generator. The case is one of many potential landmark lawsuits brought by copyright owners against tech companies including Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta over the data used to train their generative AI systems.
The technology is a vexed topic in the literary world. Many authors are concerned about the use of their copyrighted material in generative AI models. At the same time, some are actively using these technologies — even attempting to train AI models on their own works. These experiments, though limited, are teaching their authors new things about creativity.
Detecting when text has been generated by tools like ChatGPT is a difficult task. Popular artificial- intelligence-detection tools, like GPTZero, may provide some guidance for users by telling them when something was written by a bot and not a human, but even specialized software is not foolproof and can spit out false positives.
Source: Everything You Need to Know About AI Detectors for ChatGPT
The U.S. Department of Commerce has proposed new customer verification requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers. The goal of the ‘Know Your Customer’ regime is to prevent fraud and abuse, including piracy. In response to this plan, prominent rightsholders want the department to expand the proposal’s scope to include domain name registrars and registries. Ideally, they argue, domain companies should also be required to take down pirate domains.
Source: Rightsholders Want U.S. “Know Your Customer” Proposal to Include Domain Name Services * TorrentFreak
Last week, Concord – partly financed by Apollo Global Management – launched a USD $1.511 billion cash bid for the portfolio of Hipgnosis Songs Fund. That was the equivalent of USD $1.25 per share. Today (April 29), Blackstone and HSF’s board have jointly announced a new offer from Blackstone worth around$60 million more than Concord’s latest bid.
Earlier this month, US publishing body the NMPA lobbed some brickbats at Spotify over its new music and audiobooks bundle, which (under the current US royalty rates agreement) would generate lower mechanical royalties for publishers. Now another body, the Association of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP) has backed the NMPA’s stance.
Source: Indie publishing body AIMP criticises Spotify bundle strategy