Copyright & Creators

Some authors say Anthropic's $1.5 billion book-piracy settlement, covering nearly 500,000 works at roughly $3,000 each, isn't enough. Novelists Tobias Wolff and Chang-rae Lee have opted out of the Bartz v. Anthropic deal to pursue a…

Courts & Lawsuits · Anthropic

A study of 20 people using an AI image-editing tool called Roop found a consistent pattern in how they divvy up creative credit: they see themselves as the directors who decided what should change, while crediting AI for the visual…

A legal analysis argues AI is quietly breaking a key assumption baked into intellectual property law: that reverse-engineering a product's code, chips, or firmware is hard, slow, and requires rare expertise. Courts and statutes have long…

Courts & Lawsuits

US arts and media employment has fallen by more than 200,000 jobs since mid-2022, to about 1.2 million, with roughly 50,000 lost in the past year, economics writer Joseph Politano calculates from Bureau of Labor Statistics data on his…

AI & Jobs

The owners of Elvis Presley's music, led by Authentic Brands Group, sued Anthropic on Friday, accusing it of using 274 of his songs, including "Can't Help Falling in Love" and "Don't Be Cruel," to train its Claude models without…

Courts & Lawsuits · Anthropic

Quebec publisher Éditions du Boréal has cut ties with novelist Thélyson Orélien, saying new information shows AI was used to write his acclaimed novel C'était ça ou mourir, CBC News reports. Boréal won't reprint the book or publish him…

Kotaku's Lewis Parker reports a wave of browser-playable versions of older games, among them Halo: Combat Evolved, GTA: Vice City, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Skate 3 and The Simpsons: Hit and Run, rebuilt by decompiling the original game…

Anthropic

Newly released court filings in the Authors Guild's copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft allege internal documents show employees knew the risks and proceeded anyway. Plaintiffs claim the records reveal a 'mass piracy scheme,'…

Courts & Lawsuits · OpenAI · Microsoft

When her barista who hand-chalked menu signs moved away, Megi Endeladze, co-owner of Penny's Coffee Shop in Buffalo, used ChatGPT to design a replacement poster and had it professionally printed for roughly $350 total. She posted a photo…

OpenAI

A new research paper reframes how to think about AI and creativity: instead of asking whether a chatbot can be "creative," it asks what happens when humans and AI collaborate in groups. The argument is that AI makes individual ideas more…

AI Adoption

A one-week study with 16 writers tested AI 'thought partners'—agents that proactively chime in during writing rather than waiting to be prompted, like a smarter version of autocomplete. Researchers let participants configure when and how…

AI Agents

A developer built RollTab, an iPhone/iPad app that autocompletes piano playing in real time as you play a MIDI keyboard, powered by a small AI model (125 million parameters, compact by industry standards) running entirely on the device…

Reports circulating this week say the EU has affirmed that purely AI-generated content cannot receive copyright protection—mirroring existing U.S. policy, where the Copyright Office has denied protection to works lacking human authorship.…

Regulation & Policy · Europe & UK

Anna's Archive, the shadow library best known for pirating books to build AI training datasets, is now urging volunteers to scan rare books before publishers destroy them. The site points to Anthropic's "Project Panama," revealed during…

Anthropic

Oracle has banned AI-generated code from OpenJDK, the open-source project behind Java, citing safety, security, and intellectual property risks. Developers can use chatbots privately to debug or review code but can't submit AI-written…

AI Adoption

A writer, anxious that readers or publishers might wrongly assume his novel was AI-generated, built a version-control tool that logs a manuscript's full drafting history—every edit, cut, and revision—much the way GitHub tracks code…

Deepfakes & Misinformation

Researchers built and tested CRAFT, a smart-glasses system that helps novelists and short-story writers turn everyday encounters into fiction material as they happen. In field trials with eight writers over 24 sessions, participants used…

Codeberg, a nonprofit alternative to GitHub popular with open-source and privacy-focused developers, is putting a proposal to its members ahead of a 2026 vote: ban hosting projects that mostly consist of AI-generated code. The platform…

Open-Weight Models

A federal judge gave final approval Monday to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors—the largest copyright recovery in U.S. history, and the first major resolution of the wave of lawsuits over how AI models are trained. The case…

Courts & Lawsuits · Anthropic

A developer published an open-source pipeline that uses Claude as a 'director,' coordinating separate AI tools for video (Seedance), images (Nano Banana), and voice (ElevenLabs) to assemble a 10-minute movie. The repo includes a…

AI Agents · Anthropic

Researchers gave Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol a genuinely open-ended task: direct a music video for 'Uptown Funk' with budgets of $25 and $100, using tools including web search, image generators, video models, and ffmpeg for editing.…

AI Agents · Anthropic · OpenAI

AI search keeps users inside the platform rather than sending them to websites, according to a new study using Comscore clickstream data. ChatGPT produces outbound clicks in only 5.2% of conversation sessions—far below Google's referral…

AI Business & Money · OpenAI

Researchers have proposed a framework for compensating musicians whose work trains generative AI models, with payments tied to how much each artist's catalog actually contributes to the AI's outputs. The key finding: when attribution…

A developer spent 100 hours last month auditing every dependency in git-annex, a file-syncing tool, to ensure none contain LLM-generated code—a policy some open-source maintainers have adopted over code quality and licensing concerns. The…

AI Adoption

In a new working paper distributed by the NBER, Harvard Business School economist Alex Chan argues that AI answer systems may be undermining the economic model that sustains open-web publishing. The core mechanism: when AI platforms…

AI Business & Money

A coalition of publishers that together own nearly 400 local and regional newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan—the largest copyright action yet brought by local news against the AI industry. The…

Courts & Lawsuits · OpenAI · Microsoft

Two studies this week probed the same question from different angles—how good has machine translation actually gotten, and can anyone tell? In the newer one, researchers asked 15 avid readers to compare human and AI translations of 15…

In a world-first ruling, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority is requiring Google to let publishers block their content from its AI-generated search summaries (AI Overviews and AI Mode) without dropping out of ordinary search results…

Regulation & Policy · Europe & UK · Google

In a forceful opening address at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille, New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger accused the AI industry of an "original sin"—"a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an…

A24's 'Backrooms,' directed by 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons, opened at $81 million domestically—more than tripling A24's previous record and making Parsons the youngest director to debut at 1. The film cost roughly $10 million to…

Norway's National Library is building a Norwegian-language LLM using its massive digitized archive—20 petabytes of unique data collected since 2005—to train a model that understands Norwegian history, news, and culture. The library runs…

Europe & UK · Regulation & Policy

OpenAI signed its first Brazilian media partnership, licensing content from Grupo Folha and Grupo UOL—two of the country's largest news organizations. ChatGPT will surface summaries from Folha de S.Paulo and UOL with attribution and source…

AI Business & Money · OpenAI

Anna's Archive, the shadow library that aggregates pirated books and academic papers, published a file specifically addressed to AI language models, offering bulk data access via torrents and APIs in exchange for donations. The site argues…

Project Gutenberg, the volunteer-run digital library offering over 75,000 public domain eBooks, says it has significantly improved its website over the past few months with more updates planned. The 54-year-old nonprofit relies on…

Researchers have developed a technique to trace which web scrapers feed training data to which AI systems. The method plants unique "canary tokens" on dynamic websites; when an LLM later generates output containing a specific token, it…

A blog post argues that using AI-generated art is a losing bet: at best, audiences don't mind; at worst, they think less of you. The author recommends alternatives like simple photo edits, hand-drawn sketches, or commissioned work—noting…

Five major publishers—Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage—plus novelist Scott Turow filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg on May 5, alleging the company illegally copied millions of…

Courts & Lawsuits · Meta

A small academic study explored how to evaluate AI-assisted creative tools without treating artists as mere test subjects. Researchers worked with nine digital artists over three weeks using ArtKrit, a computational drawing tool…

A Chicago music fan who has recorded over 10,000 concert tapes since the 1980s is working with Internet Archive volunteers to digitize the collection. About 2,500 tapes are now online, including rare recordings of Nirvana (from 1989, two…

A Spanish developer discovered that Docker Hub pulls fail during La Liga football matches because Spanish ISPs are blocking Cloudflare IP addresses under a December 2024 Barcelona court order—apparently aimed at piracy. The block hits…

Courts & Lawsuits · Europe & UK

Google released Lyria 3 and Lyria 3 Pro in public preview through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. Lyria 3 Pro generates tracks up to three minutes with structural control—intros, verses, choruses, bridges—while Lyria 3 Clip creates…

Deepfakes & Misinformation · Google

A service called Malus claims to use AI to recreate open source software packages in a 'clean room' process, allegedly producing 'legally distinct' code that avoids attribution and copyleft license obligations. The company says its AI…

Open-Weight Models

A joint study by computer scientists and art historians examined whether vision-language models actually 'see' art the way experts do. The finding: substantially yes. Art historians evaluated the visual concepts these models use to…

Science & Discovery

Tess.Design, an AI image marketplace that paid artists 50% royalties when users generated images in their fine-tuned styles, shut down in January 2026 after less than two years. The founders' retrospective reveals the challenge: of 325…

AI Business & Money

Researchers developed CoCo, a framework that improves AI image generation by having the model write executable code as an intermediate planning step. Instead of generating images directly from text prompts, the system first produces code…

Descript now offers AI-powered multilingual video dubbing using OpenAI models. The system translates video dialogue while optimizing for both semantic accuracy and lip-sync timing—addressing the common problem where direct translations…

AI Adoption · OpenAI

Researchers developed a lightweight method for controlling AI audio generation without retraining entire models. The approach, called Latent-Control Heads (LatCHs), lets users fine-tune generated audio—adjusting intensity, pitch, and…

Y Combinator-backed startup Cardboard launched an AI video editor that claims to turn raw footage into polished edits in minutes. The tool promises automatic framing, captions, beat-matched cuts, and natural language search for clips—you…

AI Adoption

A new demo appeared on Hugging Face offering audio-to-video generation using LTX2, a lightweight video generation model. The tool appears to let users input audio and generate corresponding video content. Details on capabilities and…

Researchers have developed MMHNet, a video-to-audio generation system that can produce synchronized soundtracks for videos over 5 minutes long—trained only on short clips. Current AI audio tools typically struggle with longer content…

Anthropic claims three Chinese AI companies—MiniMax, DeepSeek, and Moonshot—distilled Claude's capabilities at scale using fraudulent accounts. The company alleges the firms created over 24,000 fake accounts and generated more than 16…

China & Geopolitics · AI Business & Money · Anthropic

A now-removed Microsoft guide allegedly referenced using Harry Potter content for LLM training, with the dataset hosted on Kaggle (which Microsoft owns). The original article has been taken down, leaving only archive links. Community…

Microsoft

Google added Lyria 3, which it calls its most advanced music generation model, to the Gemini app. Users can now create 30-second music tracks from text prompts or images. The feature positions Google alongside competitors like Suno and…

Google

Radio host David Greene claims Google's NotebookLM copied his voice for the tool's male AI narrator without consent. Greene, a former NPR host, alleges the synthetic voice sounds like him, though he has not presented evidence such as…

Google

Major publishers including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Financial Times are blocking or limiting the Internet Archive's web crawlers. The concern: AI companies could use the Archive's structured databases and APIs as a convenient…

A Mexican engineering student built CineGraphs, a tool that generates branching story paths visualized as graphs—letting screenwriters explore narrative possibilities before committing to a linear script. The interesting finding: training…

New book releases have tripled since 2022, but average quality has dropped—most of the surge comes from new authors producing low-rated work, according to a study tracking the LLM era's impact on publishing. The counterintuitive finding…

ACE-Step-1.5, an open-source AI music generator, launched with an MIT license—meaning businesses can use it freely, including commercially. The developers claim performance approaching Suno, the leading commercial music AI. The release…

Open-Weight Models

Researchers analyzed Pixiv data around a major text-to-image AI launch and found illustrators significantly reduced their uploads afterward, while comic artists were less affected. The study tracked comprehensive posting patterns and…

AI & Jobs

Researchers found book releases tripled between 2022-2025 as LLMs proliferated, with quality effects varying by tier. While the top 1,000 monthly releases per category maintained higher quality than pre-LLM periods, the top 100 did not.…

Deepfakes & Misinformation