One of the biggest labels in the music industry is Suing Anthropic

Headlines this week

• Major newspapers are trying make a deal with AI companiesas a dispute brews over the copyrighted material the companies mentioned used to train their content generation algorithms.
• New York Mayor Eric Adams has verifiably stated this The most annoying use of AI, designed to spam city residents with automated robocalls. Well done, dude!
• Last but not least: The Daily Beast actually has one interesting article Looking at the interface between cybercrime and large language models.

The top story: The creative industry’s ongoing war with AI

If one thing has become clear in the last few months, it is that generative AI is indeed disruptive. “Disruption” has been a popular buzzword in Silicon Valley for years, meant to signal world-changing innovations. Most of the time there is little justification for using the term. Not so with AI. This is a technology original It disturbs large parts of society and therefore seems to annoy many people.

Case in point: Universal Music Group, one of the music industry’s most powerful labels, filed a $75 million lawsuit against the well-known AI company Anthropic this week. The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of “systematic and widespread infringement of…”[artists’] “Copyrighted Lyrics” is one of the largest lawsuits of its kind filed to date. UMG represents hordes of the world’s biggest commercial artists, including Drake, The Weeknd and Taylor Swift, and has significant influence over the entertainment industry.

Anthropic is not a small company either. The company, founded by a number of former OpenAI employees, has launched your own chatbot, Claude, which is one of the most popular on the market today. The company has also received significant moves from powerful tech giants, including Amazon (bis). the sum of 4 billion US dollars) and Google (which invested hundreds of millions in the startup), and it even made quite a bit of money before –about $500 million-out of Alameda Researchthe investment firm run by FTX, accused the criminal Sam Bankman-Fried.

In short: Anthropic is a heavyweight in the emerging AI industry, so it’s interesting that the company is currently facing a pretty serious lawsuit from an equally large and powerful corporate giant. This is a clear sign of how serious the argument is when it comes to AI providers using copyrighted content to train their content generation algorithms. Obviously, this is not the first copyright lawsuit related to AI-generated content. As a matter of fact, there were crowds of them. The difference is the extent to which this lawsuit appears to have some weight because of the plaintiff.

Question of the day: What’s the problem with Jon Stewart?

This week’s Jon Stewart’s political comedy show, The Problem, with Jon StewartWas abruptly canceled by Apple. Word on the street is that Stewart’s show was canceled because he wanted to do an episode about AI and China. The edge characterized the show’s death as a result of “editorial disagreements with Apple” over the issue, although there are no real details about what those disagreements were. However, Stewart’s show didn’t go particularly well either. The The reviews weren’t good and the critical reception of the series had too was pretty “bleh.” Still, the idea that Apple may have canceled the show in part because Jon was too critical of AI is enough to make you worried about the future of media.

Unfortunately there is no interview this week! Unfortunately, I simply didn’t have time to make an appointment. However, we promise to chat with someone fascinating next week as usual.