As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. “The world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” says on its site.
Source: AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop
Search referral traffic is in decline due to increasing usage of AI. This has been common knowledge among online publishers since the proliferation of chat interfaces and generated summaries in search results, and we now have concrete data to prove it with the AOP’s newly launched “Artificial Intelligence Publisher Impact Study”.
Source: Google search traffic to leading UK publishers set to halve by Q3 2027
For publishers, businesses, banks and others that relied on Google to funnel its billions of users to their websites, the impact has been unmistakable as the company has increasingly incorporated A.I. into search. Google’s users are no longer leaving Google after a search and are just reading its A.I.-generated answers, they said, which means fewer people are coming to their websites and search traffic has dropped.
Source: Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed
Udio has selected content-security firm BuyDRM to protect the streaming of its AI-generated music. The Austin-based company will provide multi-DRM support across Google Widevine, Apple FairPlay, and Microsoft PlayReady through its KeyOS MultiKey Service. The deal, announced on July 14, forms part of the technical infrastructure behind Udio‘s move from copyright defendant to licensed music platform.
Source: Udio taps content-security BuyDRM to secure its AI music ‘walled garden’
Streaming’s real innovation wasn’t just access, it was the playlist as the primary unit of consumption, which has a cost in context collapse. A song’s meaning shrinks to whatever sits before and after it in an algorithmically assembled sequence. Compare that to the relationship between an artist and a radio programmer. Getting a song onto a show implied editorial investment.
Source: Why dedicated fans are trading infinite choice for trusted curation
Nolan’s brand power and commercial track record got Comcast’s Universal Pictures to say yes to a roughly $250 million, R-rated adaptation of an ancient Greek poem shot across Europe with largely practical visual effects, including a 35-foot tall Trojan Horse. According to data from Rentrak provided by Universal, 53% of “The Odyssey” attendees said the director was their No. 1 reason for attending.
Source: Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Proves Hollywood’s Top Directors Are Franchises Now
The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers.
Source: Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius
When recording technology emerged in the late 19th century, it transformed how people experienced music. Before Thomas Edison’s phonograph appeared in 1877, music was largely encountered through live performance or written notation. Recordings changed that. Performances could be captured, copied and distributed by machines. Today, recordings feel like an obvious form of creative property. But that was not how they were initially viewed.
Source: Who owns an AI generated song? What we can learn from the phonograph
ABBA member and CISAC president Björn Ulvaeus took the stage at the United Nations’ AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva on Monday (July 13) to ask a simple question: “Good for whom?” “Tracing the output was always the wrong question,” he said. “The right question is much simpler. It is about the training. Our works went in. We should be paid for what went in, not for every output that comes out the other end, but for the raw material that made the machine what it is.”
Source: ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus Talks AI Training at UNSummit: Artists ‘Deserve a Place at the Table’
Media research expert Nic Newman has warned the ability of AI models to provide “liquid content” in different formats is a “really serious challenge” to news media. He gave the example of asking Claude questions relating to the UK heatwaves, including where the UK stands in terms of air conditioning compared to other countries and previous temperature records. Claude was able to produce information in a Q&A format, generate graphs which were filterable by different parts of the world, and show Met Office warnings.
Source: Claude’s ability to remix ‘liquid content’ is ‘serious challenge for news media’