ByteDance faces mounting pressure from major entertainment companies over its Seedance video generation tool. Disney and Paramount Skydance have sent cease-and-desist letters to the Chinese technology giant, accusing it of copyright infringement. Disney’s lawyers claim ByteDance provides users with a “pirated library” of copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel and other franchises. David Singer, a …
OpenAI has removed the word “safely” from its mission statement, a change documented in its 2024 tax filing with the Internal Revenue Service. The deletion coincides with the company’s transformation from a nonprofit organization into a for-profit business. The original mission statement from 2022 and 2023 read: “to build general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) that safely …
The music industry faces an existential dilemma as AI-generated songs infiltrate streaming platforms, prompting major labels to sign licensing deals while artists and platforms struggle to define acceptable boundaries. Anna Nicolaou and Cristina Criddle report for the Financial Times. A recent incident in Sweden illustrates the tension. A folk-pop song by “Jacub” topped Spotify charts …
Anthropic spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and physically destroy millions of books for training its Claude AI chatbot. The company cut off book spines and scanned pages in a covert initiative called “Project Panama.” Aaron Schaffer reports for The Washington Post, detailing the operation through more than 4,000 pages of unsealed court …
Governments in the United Kingdom and Ireland are taking legislative action to address the misuse of artificial intelligence in creating non-consensual images and voice recordings. The UK government is enforcing a law this week that makes it a criminal offense to create or request non-consensual intimate images. This move specifically targets tools like the Grok …
Disney has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, alleging that the tech giant is using artificial intelligence to infringe copyrights on a massive scale. Todd Spangler reports for Variety. The entertainment company claims Google copies Disney’s copyrighted works without authorization to train generative AI models. Disney also alleges that Google uses these models to distribute …
Disney and OpenAI have announced a three-year licensing agreement that allows users to create videos featuring over 200 Disney characters using the Sora AI video platform. Disney will invest $1 billion in OpenAI and receive warrants for additional equity as part of the deal. The agreement covers characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars …
Warner Music Group has announced a partnership with the AI music generator Suno, settling a previous copyright infringement lawsuit. Murray Stassen reports for Music Business Worldwide. The two companies will collaborate on developing new licensed AI music models. According to the announcement, the deal gives artists and songwriters full control over the use of their …
Warner Music has settled a lawsuit with the artificial intelligence startup Udio and entered into a licensing agreement, according to people familiar with the matter. This deal allows Udio to use music from Warner’s extensive catalog, which includes artists like Ed Sheeran and Madonna. Anna Nicolaou reports for the Financial Times that the agreement paves …
The nonprofit Common Crawl Foundation is supplying AI companies with copyrighted news articles scraped from behind paywalls, enabling firms like OpenAI and Google to train their large language models on high-quality journalism. The organization publicly states that it only collects freely available content. Alex Reisner reports for The Atlantic that this claim is false. According …