Facebook parent company Meta has removed some of its AI celebrity chatbots, with “temporary changes” to its chatbot policies related to teens. The changes come ahead of a Senate probe launched to investigate reports of the chatbots engaging in “sensual” conversations with minors.
Source: Meta Did Not Have Permission to Make Its Flirty Celeb Chatbots
Vinyl, CDs, and cassettes remain exempt from U.S. tariffs, but the likes of Bandcamp are addressing impacts on shipping, merch, and more. Notwithstanding the exception for vinyl and CDs, Discogs has warned that “customs and postal carriers may experience delays or mistakes as they adjust to the new requirements.” (Other national carriers are said to have paused U.S. deliveries altogether.)
Source: Vinyl & CDs Remain Exempt from Tariffs — Merch Subject to Duties
On September 29, U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib plans to reintroduce her Living Wage for Musicians Act in Congress—and the United Musicians and Allied Workers union (UMAW) is busy drumming up support ahead of time. The union is encouraging artists and fans alike to write to their Congress members and ask them to support the bill when it hits the floor later this month.
Source: Living Wage for Musicians Act is Back, Reintroduced to Congress
YouTube’s parent company, Google, is using a subset of the platform’s videos to train AI applications, including its text-to-video tool Veo. That includes videos made by users who have built their livelihoods on the service, helping turn it into the biggest streaming entertainment provider in the U.S. The move has sparked deep tensions between the world’s biggest online video company and some of the creators who helped make it a behemoth.
Source: Google is training its AI tools on YouTube videos. These creators aren’t happy
Fake books. Made-up sources. Bogus trampoline bunnies. We’re all getting a lot of AI-generated content in our feeds these days. But a new working paper suggests there’s a silver lining for trusted news organizations: they may be able to benefit from the broader degradation of the information ecosystem and win over subscribers concerned about sifting through the slop on their own.
Source: Trusted news sites may benefit in an internet full of AI-generated fakes, a new study finds
It concluded that because songwriters are not “owed” black box royalties, the class doesn’t have a legitimate claim under UK law. It also concluded that Rowntree’s lawyers hadn’t proposed an alternative to PRS’ method of distributing black box royalties, and doubted that the “cost-benefit” ratio of the lawsuit made sense, given that PRS is a not-for-profit owned by its publisher and songwriter members.
If publishers cannot monetise content, they cannot reinvest in the accurate and authoritative journalism readers rely upon to make informed decisions that empower them to participate effectively in democratic processes. Publisher trade bodies see Canada-EU trade deal as chance to curb big tech power. A possible Canada-European Union Digital Trade Agreement could help scale Canadian and European innovation leaders, while ensuring the ethical, positive and responsible use of AI through reasonable guardrails.
Source: EU and Canada publishers issue joint plea to halt AI ‘strip mining’ of news
The European Union’s flagship technology regulations may have emerged unchanged from last week’s framework trade deal with the U.S., but they remain very much in the sites of the Trump administration. On Monday, citing “sources familiar with the matter,” Reuters reported the White House is considering placing additional tariffs on the EU or placing sanctions on member-state officials responsible for implementing the Digital Services Act.
Over the past two months, OpenAI has tied up with e-commerce majors Shopee and Shopify, while Google and Perplexity have doled out free access to their advanced AI tools to some users in India. Experts believe these moves will help the companies access structured consumer queries, product behaviors, and transactional data — training signals that are often unavailable via public data alone.
More than eight in ten people have claimed they still click on a website link after reading an AI Overview in Google search results. Some 13.3% of people claimed to do so every time, 30.5% said they often do, 41.5% said they sometimes do and 10.3% said they rarely click through. The findings came in a survey of 1,000 US adults carried out via Pollfish for digital marketing agency NP Digital.
Source: Survey suggests readers still click on links after reading Google AI Overview