Content Aware media news: September 26, 2024

Big Tech's antitrust saga, AI vs copyright, structured data guides - all in this week's Content Aware.

Published: 17:19, 26 September 2024

A sigh of the times
A famous newspaper revives a long dead writer via AI and sets it loose on its pages. Furore ensues. But, says our resident critic in chief Rob, aside from the expected boost in awareness the title will no doubt receive, the experiment may only affirm that there's no replacement for people where it matters - in the perception of the audience.
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Aye guv'nor
California Governor Gavin Newsom is passing more AI and digital bills than anyone else in the world right now. Here's what he's signed in the last few weeks alone.
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The ends justify the memes
Google’s UK boss provoked both flab and gast when she said copyright should be abolished for AI to steal, as part of a eulogising report into the potential of AI and of Google to solve every current and future ill. Since Google local bosses don't say much unauthorised, we assumed this messaging is being parroted elsewhere - and so it was just two days later when CEO Sundar Pichai made much the same case to the United Nations. Essentially, "Here we come to save the day! (and you all need to stop thinking about pesky regulation that might stop us.)" What are Google bosses saying near you? Another delightful morsel from the UK Googler was her claim that the company should be given cheaper electricity, which other companies are no doubt delighted to hear too.
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You say anti, we say trust
The antitrust saga continues. ''If we sink, so do you," Google seems to be saying to Microsoft as it filed its own antitrust complaint against its Silicon Valley rival over cloud market competition. Meanwhile again Apple faces antitrust woes of its own: EU regulators have warned Apple it must open up its devices to rivals under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
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Detective Lofgrendons
You don't have to be a publishing guru to know that Forbes hits the results pages of search with startling regularity. Like or not, site owners the world over would love to know how they do it. Lars Lofgrendons dons his detective hat to find out.
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LinkedIn's sneaky scraping
LinkedIn's hand was caught in the cookie jar by using user data to feed its AI. Although it responded to a request from the UK ICO to end the practice and not to scrape future UK data, what's been captured already will not be excluded from training. If you don't consent to being a product, be sure to update your Data Privacy settings.
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The murky legal waters of AI-generated art
Thaler v. Perlmutter leaves judges and IP professionals divided over AI-generated art and copyright. The judges deem Thaler's work devoid of human authorship, but questions linger over the level of human creativity that goes into prompting the AI. The matter is more confused by Thaler not even doing the prompting, but instead being the owner of the AI used. Expect more of this mess.
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Amazon & Content Credentials
On the matter of transparency of AI-generated images, Amazon is adding Content Credentials to images generated by its Titan model - one of the image models available within Glide's AI image generation capabilities.
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Volume over meaning
Sam Altman switches to his AI salesman alter-ego in his new blog post to tell the world we need to double down on [whatever it is OpenAI needs this week] in order to ''have superintelligence in a few thousand days.'' Get out of my way humanity, you’re stopping me from saving you!
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ChatGPT security alert
Not a real shocker that ChatGPT has some security risks, but when someone reports a huge vulnerability, you'd expect them to be on top of it. Not so much, as evidenced by the experience of one security researcher.
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A.I. delirium
Microsoft’s Copilot AI recently went ultra-libellous about journalist Martin Bernklau. Imagine if it was a newspaper saying what the AI had claimed. All the more reason why AI needs human oversight.
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Barry on structured data
Structured data best practices from arguably the best publishing SEO there is (and our esteemed solution partner) Barry Adams of Polemic Digital. A must read for anyone in publishing.
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