The artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay $1.5 billion to settle a copyright lawsuit with authors and publishers. This represents the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright cases. Cade Metz reports for The New York Times that the settlement follows a judge’s ruling that Anthropic illegally downloaded millions of books from pirated online …
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 …
AI assistants in virtual meetings are recording and transcribing private discussions and jokes, sometimes with embarrassing results for users. These tools can automatically distribute summaries of entire calls, including informal small talk, to all participants. As reported by Ann-Marie Alcántara in the Wall Street Journal, this raises new concerns about privacy and context in the …
Researchers from Arizona State University conclude that the reasoning abilities of large language models are a “brittle mirage.” According to an article by Kyle Orland in Ars Technica, these models struggle significantly with problems that deviate from their training data. In a controlled experiment, the researchers found that an AI’s performance collapsed when tasks were …
The IT security company Cloudflare claims that the AI answer engine Perplexity is using undeclared web crawlers to access content on websites that explicitly forbid it. According to a blog post authored by several Cloudflare engineers, Perplexity ignores standard protocols designed to respect the preferences of website owners. Cloudflare conducted an experiment to verify the …
Google is promoting the rapid adoption of its artificial intelligence features, while new research and reports from publishers raise concerns about the technology’s impact on web traffic and the quality of information. The conflicting narratives highlight a central tension in the current evolution of web search. On a Q2 2025 investor call, Alphabet and Google …
The public discourse on artificial intelligence has fractured into two opposing camps, creating what one journalist calls “parallel universes.” According to an article by Matteo Wong in The Atlantic, this growing divide pits AI zealots against entrenched skeptics. This polarization makes it difficult to have a nuanced conversation about the technology’s actual effects. The boosters, …
Cloudflare has launched a new marketplace called “Pay per Crawl”, allowing website owners to charge AI companies for scraping their content. According to a report by Maxwell Zeff in TechCrunch, the system, currently in a private beta, aims to give publishers more control over their data. Website owners can set a price for each “crawl”, …
Recent academic studies indicate that using generative AI tools like ChatGPT can reduce brain activity and lead to less original writing. According to an article by Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker, these experiments suggest a “cognitive cost” to relying on AI for tasks humans previously did themselves. One study at the Massachusetts Institute of …
Scammers are increasingly using artificial intelligence to create and sell images of plants that do not exist. These fraudulent online listings target plant enthusiasts with pictures of exotic and impossibly perfect flowers or succulents, luring them with low prices. A blog post by the retailer Bob’s Market explains that customers who purchase these items may …