A federal judge has delivered a landmark ruling in the ongoing legal battle between authors and AI companies over copyright infringement. Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California found that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books to train its Claude AI models constitutes fair use under copyright law. The case began when authors Andrea …
Publishers face an existential crisis as artificial intelligence companies extract their content without providing fair compensation, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned at an event in Cannes. Christine Wang reported for Axios. Prince revealed striking statistics about the imbalance between content scraping and traffic referrals. Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it …
Sean Goedecke predicts that AI language models will eventually cause a mass-casualty disaster, drawing parallels to early transportation accidents. The author notes that railways took 17 years to produce their first major disaster, while aviation took 11 years. ChatGPT launched in November 2022, making the timeline significant. He identifies AI agents as the most likely …
The Wikimedia Foundation has paused its trial of AI-generated article summaries following fierce opposition from Wikipedia editors. The experiment would have shown machine-generated summaries at the top of articles on mobile devices for two weeks. Emanuel Maiberg reports for 404 Media that editors called the plan a “very bad idea” and warned it would cause …
News publishers are experiencing dramatic traffic declines as Google’s artificial intelligence features replace traditional search results. Major outlets report losing more than half their search-driven visitors over the past three years. Isabella Simonetti and Katherine Blunt report in The Wall Street Journal that Google’s AI Overviews and new AI Mode are fundamentally changing how users …
The $1.5 billion AI startup Builder.ai has filed for bankruptcy after revelations that it used human developers instead of artificial intelligence. Vinay Patel reports for International Business Times that the company’s supposed AI system was actually operated by 700 Indian programmers pretending to be automated bots. Builder.ai raised over $450 million from prominent investors including …
Tech companies are making AI chatbots more engaging to keep users talking longer, but this approach could lead to harmful consequences. Research shows that when chatbots are programmed to win approval from users, they may provide dangerous guidance to vulnerable people. The study was conducted by researchers including academics and Google’s head of AI safety, …
Travel website founder Nate Hake claims Google deliberately destroyed thousands of independent publishers to make room for AI-powered search features. In a 34-page letter to the Federal Trade Commission, Hake details how his site Travel Lemming lost over 95% of its Google search traffic following algorithm updates in late 2023 and early 2024. Hake argues …
Stanford University researchers have created a new benchmark to measure excessive flattery in AI chatbots after OpenAI rolled back updates to GPT-4o due to complaints about overly polite responses. The research, conducted with Carnegie Mellon University and University of Oxford, was reported by Emilia David. The team developed “Elephant,” a test that evaluates how much …
Getty Images is spending millions of dollars in legal fees to fight what its CEO calls “unfair competition” by AI companies that use copyrighted material without permission. Craig Peters told CNBC that AI firms are stealing protected content to train their models for commercial gain. The photo licensing company is suing Stability AI, the British …