Monday 8th July: Artists and journalists team up to take on AI copycats

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Time was when we’d say that the battle between adblockers and publishers was an arms race. And there was a time where we’d say that the relationship between publishers and platforms was a race to establish value. Well, now the tech arms race and push to prove value have coalesced around AI — and this time journalists have allies.

Artists can extremely precious when it comes to ownership of and denigration of their work. Just look at the endless strikes in the US designed to limit the impact of AI with the potential to replace actors. As the article linked above demonstrates, that’s now extending to the writing side of TV and films as well — and that’s bound to have implications for journalists too.

That said, it’s easier said than done to prove that AI hasn’t been trained on and then ripped off your work as a writer or artist. The tool Glaze (great name) has been hit by a series of attacks designed to undermine its mission to protect the original work of the artists and creators that use it. It’s surely only a matter of time before we see similar attempts — and counterattempts — from the world’s biggest publishers.

The Tories are out and there’s a lot of examination to be done of whether the right-leaning tabloids have lost what soft power they had left. But, in the meantime, here’s a fantastic look at how three media companies covered the election in as-close-to real time as is humanly possible — and added some real value to their audiences as they did so.

All I know about Tubi is that it’s a respository of the absolute worst horror movies of all time, the sort of self-distributed schlock that would never find a home elsewhere, because it’s bottom of the barrel trash produced in volume. Murdoch stock in trade, then.

If you didn’t know, Peter has a bee in his bonnet about the idea that ‘print is dead’. Of course, like any format — even cassettes! — it still has its place. In this article (which doesn’t once mention Zuul) Peter explains why the idea is so ubiquitous, but also misinformed.

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