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Tech companies have downloaded more than 15 million videos from over two million YouTube channels to train their artificial intelligence models. Alex Reisner reports for The Atlantic that this practice often occurs without the creators’ permission and violates the platform’s terms of service. The investigation identified at least 13 data sets containing the scraped content, …
A coalition of major web publishers, including Reddit, Yahoo, and Quora, has launched a new system called Really Simple Licensing (RSL). The standard aims to make AI companies pay for using online content to train their artificial intelligence models. The RSL Standard builds on the existing `robots.txt` protocol, a file that gives instructions to web …
Videos created using artificial intelligence are flooding social media platforms and generating substantial revenue for their creators, despite widespread criticism of the low-quality content. John Ruwitch reports for NPR. Mark Lawrence I Garilao, a 21-year-old computer science student from the Philippines, earns up to $9,000 per month creating simple animated videos featuring a kitten character. …
A widely misunderstood statistic from a new MIT report suggests corporate artificial intelligence projects are failing, but the study reveals the opposite. Michael Nuñez reports for VentureBeat that a “shadow AI economy” is thriving as employees successfully use personal AI tools for their work, outpacing official corporate initiatives. The study from MIT’s Project NANDA found …
Colleen Jones reports for Content Science Review that despite the hype around generative AI, most leaders struggle to achieve measurable business benefits. The primary reason is that AI, unlike previous technologies, is uniquely dependent on content for both its input and output. Jones identifies seven key barriers that prevent companies from succeeding with AI. A …
AI web crawlers are overwhelming websites and disrupting the economic foundation of online publishing, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. The cybersecurity company executive has launched a “pay-per-crawl” initiative to force AI companies to compensate content creators whose sites they harvest for training data. Prince argues that AI chatbots have fundamentally broken the traditional web …
The generative AI consumer app ecosystem is beginning to stabilize after years of rapid change, according to new data from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The firm’s fifth edition of its Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps ranking shows only 11 new entries on the web list, down from 17 newcomers in March 2025. Google …
A new report from MIT’s NANDA initiative reveals that 95% of corporate generative AI pilot programs are failing to deliver significant revenue growth. Sheryl Estrada of Fortune reports on the study, “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025”. The research identifies a “learning gap” and flawed integration into company workflows as the primary …
New artificial intelligence agents that can autonomously perform tasks online may significantly reduce the need for direct human interaction with websites. In a recent newsletter, web expert Jens Jacobsen describes how this technology could make many websites become invisible background infrastructure. He argues their primary role would shift from serving human users to providing data …
A British marketing agency has successfully influenced the answers of large language models like ChatGPT in a controlled experiment. The agency, Reboot, managed to get AI models to name its CEO as the “sexiest bald man of 2025”. The experiment and its results were described in an article by the company’s search director, Oliver Sissons. …