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r/technology on Reddit: CNN sues AI search startup Perplexity for allegedly copying news stories without permission
Initially, I fell into the trap of asking GPT to tell me more about a subject or topic I was interested in, but that was back in 2023 when the AI hadn’t got to the point where it was regurgitating its own content.
Cyberbullying Governance on Social Media: A Unified Framework from Content Identification to Intervention
arXiv:2605.27584v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The proliferation of social media platforms and online communities has inadvertently catalyzed the spread of cyberbullying, hate speech, and other forms of online toxicity, making the effective governance of such harm a critical societal and computational challenge. While significant strides have been made in automating content moderation, existing research predominantly treats cyberbullying governance as passive, isolated detection at the post level. This reductionist view overlooks the continuous behavioral dynamics of users, the structural diffusion of toxic events, and the critical need for proactive mitigation. To bridge these gaps, this paper proposes a unified full-lifecycle governance framework that shifts the paradigm of cyberbullying governance from isolated static detection toward integrated, continuous, and proactive moderation. Drawing on cyberbullying research and adjacent fields, we systematically synthesize the state-of-the-art literature across four interconnected stages: (1) Content Identification, (2) User and Behavior Modeling, (3) Diffusion Dynamics and Early Warning, and (4) Intervention and Governance. Furthermore, we review available datasets and evaluation practices, and discuss emerging challenges including multimodality, explainability, algorithmic fairness, and the dual-use risks of generative AI, providing a roadmap for future research toward a safer and more resilient digital ecosystem.
CNN files US copyright claims against Perplexity AI
CNN filed a US copyright case accusing Perplexity AI of illegally copying its content to train its large language models and generating outputs that are identical or substantially similar to CNN's content.
Global firms use AI at Indian hubs to bring more ad work in-house
# Global firms use AI at Indian hubs to bring more ad work in-house Published: 2026-05-27T14:33:20.642000+00:00 Source: reuters.com (reuters.com) Language: en ## Story AI (Artificial Intelligence) letters are placed on computer motherboard in this illustration taken, June 23, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights , opens new tab BENGALURU, May 27 (Reuters) - Global companies are using AI at their Indian hubs to bring more creative work in-house, cutting turnaround time and their reliance on external agencies for advertising as the new technology reshapes the ad industry. Executives at Kimberly-Clark, J.C. Penney-parent Catalyst Brands and Target India told Reuters that their global capability centers in the country are using AI tools across marketing functions - from generating product images and videos to selecting influencers and optimizing c
The end of the internet's golden age
Google's overhaul of its search bar marks a shift away from the traditional blue-link experience toward an AI-driven model that prioritizes zero-click answers.
AI stories aren’t inevitably ‘not art’
Exercising our own judgment when it comes to quality is something we should not outsource to machines
Spotify boss defends move to AI music, saying it is better than ‘slop’
Streaming platform says remix tool agreed with Universal Music Group will protect artists from piracy Spotify’s chief executive has defended the company’s move into AI-generated music, claiming it offers users and creators a better alternative to piracy and unregulated AI slop. Last week, the platform announced a new feature in which premium users will be allowed to create their own, AI-generated remixes and song covers using music from participating artists. Continue reading...
GEMA, Suno copyright ruling postponed by Munich court to July 31
A ruling in German music rights body GEMA's lawsuit against Suno has been postponed by the Munich Regional Court to July 31.
‘We can stitch together our past’: the AI-generated time-travellers vlogging from history
The content creators behind channels like Chloe VS History are using AI tools to ‘bring history to life in a really visceral way’ “I have just arrived in Tudor London, 1536,” a young woman in a green puffer jacket tells the camera. “I’m going to check in at my room in the inn, get into the market. Then, later I am meeting the actual king – yep, Henry VIII – in person.” On YouTube and other social platforms, users are flocking to watch AI-generated “history influencers”, characters that vlog their travels to historical settings. Continue reading...
Spotify chief defends AI-generated music
Streaming app strikes deal with Universal allowing subscribers to create ‘controlled’ covers and remixes
Does TikTok Promote or Cannibalize Music Streaming? Estimands and Identification with Heavy-Tailed Outcomes
arXiv:2405.14999v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study how TikTok affects demand for music on paid streaming platforms. We use Universal Music Group's (UMG) global withdrawal of its catalog from TikTok as a quasi-natural experiment. Recent work using this setting reaches mixed conclusions about whether TikTok promotes or cannibalizes streaming demand. We show that these findings can be reconciled by making the estimand explicit: with heavy-tailed exposure and outcomes, common difference-in-differences (DiD) implementations in levels, logs, and Poisson answer different economic questions. In our data, the top 10% of songs account for 96% of TikTok creations and 76% of Spotify streams, which makes the distinction between the typical song and the economically consequential song central. We find that removing TikTok access lowers Spotify demand for UMG titles, with losses concentrated among viral songs and little economically meaningful change for the long tail. Because the viral head accounts for a disproportionate share of listening and revenue, these losses drive aggregate implications. A TikTok creator-side analysis shows that some activity reallocates toward non-UMG audio when UMG content is unavailable. This substitution is limited in magnitude but economically relevant for interpreting the treatment effect because streaming compensation depends on relative stream shares. Finally, using the 2025 U.S. TikTok outage, which affected all labels symmetrically and is not subject to the label-specific spillover concern as the UMG withdrawal, we find corroborating evidence that disruptions to TikTok access reduce monetized streaming. We also provide a practitioner companion that guides the choice of DiD estimands, estimators, and diagnostics in heavy-tailed outcome settings.
Spotify is aiming for 1 billion users and 20% operating margins by 2030. Here’s how it plans to get there
CFO Christian Luiga discusses how engagement, AI, and add‑ons are driving the company's goal.
Mother of boy who may have died in TikTok challenge urges No 10 to ban social media
Ellen Roome, whose son, Jools Sweeney, was 14 when he died, wants a ban put in place for under-16s The mother of a teenager who believes he died in a TikTok challenge gone wrong has said Downing Street has been too slow to move towards a social media ban for under-16s, and accused the government of “kicking it down the road”. Ellen Roome, the mother of Jools Sweeney, 14, is among the families who will meet Keir Starmer on Tuesday as a consultation on a possible social media ban closes this week. Continue reading...
Google is cannibalizing the web to feed AI
Google Search used to direct users to websites; AI Mode will keep them in Google's garden
‘We’re expanding the cinematic toolbox’: AI fault lines on show at Cannes
Darren Aronofsky among proponents of using technology, while Guillermo del Toro says he would ‘rather die’ Under a white marquee on Cannes’ Croisette beach, with the Mediterranean glistening behind him and superyachts drifting across the horizon, the director Darren Aronofsky addressed an audience of executives and tech evangelists gathered for an “AI for Talent” summit. “There’s so much pushback against AI,” said Aronofsky, who has faced criticism over his embrace of generative AI projects though his new studio, Primordial Soup, at a time when artificial intelligence has become one of the film industry’s most divisive fault lines. Continue reading...
Everyone is blaming AI for the death of ‘craft.’ Take a good look in the mirror
AI is an easy scapegoat. The truth is that brands, consumers, and marketers all left fingerprints at the scene before AI showed up.
Classical music has survived for centuries. Will AI kill it?
Composers have always experimented with new technology — but the latest advances threaten ‘skill death’ in this centuries-old art form
FAQ: AI, misinformation and journalism | Online Journalism Blog
In this latest post in the FAQ series, I am sharing some responses to a radio interview about AI's impact on journalism. Q: Is the continuous growth of AI-generated content online a danger for journalism? It is certainly a problem yes, in three ways: it makes reporting harder, it makes it harder ...
Media giant settles for $930k with FTC over allegations it lied about eavesdropping on conversations through smart devices
Cox Media Group allegedly sold a bogus AI-powered snoopfest service
China’s AI-Made Video Is Changing the Entertainment Landscape
Such services pose an existential threat to traditional entertainment.
AI Cartoon ‘Critterz’ Looks for Tech Partner Beyond OpenAI
Critterz, a feature-length cartoon intended to showcase how OpenAI’s video-generation capabilities could revolutionize filmmaking, has missed a planned Cannes Film Festival debut after the artificial intelligence company shut down its Sora tool, forcing its creators to look for a new AI partner.
Authors suing Meta might seek early US appellate review of shadow library claims
Writers suing Meta for copyright infringement are considering asking a US appeals court to resolve an “intra-district split” on whether using shadow library books to train AI is illegal.
Meet Stable Audio 3.0, the Model Family Built for Artistic Experimentation with Open-Weight Models
Stable Audio 3.0 introduces open-weight generative audio models trained on licensed data, aimed at music and sound creation.
Detecting Synthetic Political Narratives in Cross-Platform Social Media Discourse
arXiv:2605.21540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The proliferation of large language models has introduced a new paradigm of synthetic political communication in which narratives may be generated, semantically coordinated, and strategically disseminated across platforms at scale. We present a cross-platform framework for detecting synthetic political narratives using four coordination signals -- lexical diversity D(C), temporal burstiness B(C), rhetorical repetition R(C), and semantic homogenization H(C) -- combined into a Synthetic Narrative Coordination Score SNC(C). We apply the framework to a corpus of 353,223 records spanning six geopolitical event windows collected from six Telegram channels and nine Reddit communities (2023--2026). Results show that IntelSlava exhibits the lowest lexical diversity (MATTR 0.52--0.54), the highest burstiness (B=+0.48 to +0.73), and the highest rhetorical overlap with peer channels (Jaccard 0.12), ranking first in the composite SNC(C) on four of six event windows (SNC 0.45--0.60). Rybar ranks last on all windows despite its high semantic homogenization, because its Russian-language output yields high lexical diversity and near-zero rhetorical Jaccard with English-language channels -- demonstrating that no single indicator is sufficient for coordination detection. Multi-dimensional SNC(C) scoring provides a more robust and interpretable signal than any individual metric.
US House bill would create antitrust safe harbor for independent musicians’ AI licensing
The Protect Working Musicians Act would help independent musicians who wish to license their music to streaming services or AI companies by establishing an antitrust safe harbor.
Spotify Will Set Aside Concert Tickets for Artists’ Superfans
The Swedish streaming company also announced a feature to let listeners remix music with AI.
Spotify targets high-spending superfans with AI-generated music
Streamer and Universal Music Group strike licensing deal for a paid add-on tool within Spotify’s app
How hate spreads online and why it returns: Re-entrant phases driven by collective behavior
arXiv:2605.21129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The 2025 Bondi Beach mass-shooting was perpetrated by individuals inspired by ISIS (Islamic State) propaganda that increasingly featured anti-Semitic hate content following the October 2023 start of the Israel-Palestine war. Similar stories hold for other types of hate attacks, e.g. against Muslims on May 18, 2026. There is an urgent need to get ahead of future threats by understanding how and when a newly created piece of hate content will spread system-wide online. We present a two-species coalescence-fragmentation model with Susceptible-Infected-Recovered dynamics that incorporates the following published empirical features: (1) New pieces of hate content tend to be generated and promoted by a subset of in-built communities on less regulated platforms. (2) These `hate' communities create links (hyperlinks) with each other and with non-hate communities across all platforms to form dynamically evolving clusters (i.e. coalescence) across which new hate content can then spread. (3) These clusters can get broken up by moderator shutdowns (i.e. fragmentation). We present numerical solutions and derive two levels of approximate mean-field theory: Effective Medium Theory (EMT) and Beyond Effective Medium Theory (BEMT). Both numerical and analytic solutions reveal that system-wide spreading is governed by re-entrant threshold phases: as the fraction of hate communities varies, the system can transition from spreading to no-spreading and back to spreading. The derived analytic formulae give explicit insight into how these phase boundaries might be manipulated to prevent system-wide spreading. More broadly, the re-entrant phase behavior warns that policies which steadily reduce the number of hate communities can initially succeed but then backfire if pushed further, suggesting that blanket requirements for platforms to simply do `more' are over-simplistic.
Scaling creativity in the age of AI
Storytelling is core to humanity’s DNA, stemming from our impulse to express ideals, warnings, hopes, and experiences. Technology has always been woven through the medium and the distribution: from early humans’ innovation of natural pigments and charcoals for cave paintings to literal representation by the camera. The landscape of storytelling continues to shift under our…
US deepfake legislation would expand safe harbor, takedown system
A revised version of the bipartisan NO FAKES Act aims to establish personal property rights for digital likenesses while expanding safe harbor protections and notice-and-takedown systems.
Music publishers file amended US claims against Anthropic
Universal Music, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO Music filed an amended complaint accusing Anthropic of copyright infringement through the unauthorized use of lyrics in AI model training.
Spotify and Universal Music agree deal to let subscribers create AI remixes
Licensing agreement will allow listeners to use AI to create content on streaming platform for first time Spotify and Universal Music Group have agreed on a deal that will allow subscribers to generate song covers and remixes using artificial intelligence. The licensing agreement is the first time the Swedish streaming company will allow listeners to use AI to create content through its platform. Continue reading...
UK children increasingly rely on personalized feeds and AI, Ofcom research finds
TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms dominate UK children's habits, with many relying on AI and personalized feeds despite limited understanding of how these technologies function.
US judge sustains DMCA circumvention claim against Udio by independent musicians
A US judge ruled that AI music startup Udio allegedly circumvented access controls on platforms like YouTube and Spotify to scrape songs for training, mirroring a similar ruling in a Sony lawsuit.
Gemini Omni
Google DeepMind's new multimodal generative AI model family enables video generation and conversational editing, potentially transforming marketing and media workflows.
Data shows that AI slop is taking over books, lawsuits, music and science - The Washington Post
See the data that illustrates how ChatGPT has sparked a surge in the number of new books, scientific papers, self-filed lawsuits and more.
Are Rationales Necessary and Sufficient? Tuning LLMs for Explainable Misinformation Detection
arXiv:2605.19285v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid spread of misinformation on social media platforms has become a formidable challenge. To mitigate its proliferation, Misinformation Detection (MD) has emerged as a critical research topic. Traditional MD approaches based on small models typically perform binary classification through a black-box process. Recently, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled explainable MD, where models generate rationales that explain their decisions, thereby enhancing transparency. Existing explainable MD methods primarily focus on crafting sophisticated prompts to elicit rationales from off-the-shelf LLMs. In this work, we propose a pipeline to fine-tune a dedicated LLM specifically for explainable MD. Our pipeline begins by collecting large-scale fact-checked articles, and then uses multiple strong LLMs to produce veracity predictions and rationales. To ensure high-quality training data, we leverage a filtering strategy that selects only the correct instances for fine-tuning. While this pipeline is intuitive and prevalent, our experiments reveal that naive filtering based solely on label correctness is insufficient in practice and suffers from two critical limitations: (1) Coarse-grained labels cause insufficient rationales: Rationales filtered solely based on binary labels are insufficient to adequately support their decisions; (2) Over-verification behavior causes unnecessary rationales: Stronger LLMs tend to exhibit over-verification behavior, producing excessively verbose and unnecessary rationales. To address these issues, we introduce LONSREX, a novel data synthesis pipeline to Locate Necessary and Sufficient Rationales for Explainable MD. Specifically, we propose a metric that quantifies the contribution of each verification step to the final prediction, thereby evaluating its necessity and sufficiency. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LONSREX.
The Revenue of Finance Journals: Networks, Pricing Power, and Publication Volume
arXiv:2508.14301v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: I study commercial revenue at 26 finance journals over 1999-2025, exploiting the creation of the Elsevier Finance Journal Ecosystem (a formal network of coordinated journals planned in 2019 and launched in 2020) as a quasi-natural experiment. Using synthetic control as the primary identification strategy, I find that ecosystem membership generated a projected long-run commercial revenue effect of approximately \$54-\$59 million in real 2024 USD, comprising \$48 million in citation-mechanism-implied APC revenue and \$6-\$11 million in incremental submission-fee revenue (the submission-fee range reflects uncertainty about the share of extra submissions arriving via Elsevier's Article Transfer Service, which generates no incremental fee at the receiving journal). Of this total, approximately \$40-\$44 million is directly observed and realized through 2025 (a \$36 million synthetic-control gap on APC flow revenue plus \$4-\$8 million in incremental submission fees); the remaining \$14-\$15 million reflects standard submission-to-citation-to-revenue propagation lags from citation gains realized in 2019-2025 that are projected to materialize as publication revenue through approximately 2028. The effect is highly concentrated: four core journals (FRL, IRFA, IREF, RIBAF) account for 95% of the gain. Decomposing the revenue effect into intensive (price) and extensive (volume) margins, 89% comes from expanded publication volume; per-paper pricing power rose modestly if at all. The findings speak to the economics of coordinated networks in information-goods markets and to the industrial organization of scholarly publishing.
Beyond Nutrition Labels: How Analogical Reasoning Shapes Synthetic Media Disclosure Design
arXiv:2605.19045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As synthetic media proliferates, AI policymakers and practitioners have increasingly turned to disclosures--signals describing how media has been created or modified by AI--to help audiences evaluate media credibility. While there is a growing body of research on user interpretations, the upstream decision-making processes that affect users remain underexplored. This study therefore examines how AI policymakers and practitioners design synthetic media disclosures under complex sociotechnical constraints. Drawing on 23 expert interviews and 13 case studies from organizations participating in the Partnership on AI's Synthetic Media Framework, analysis identifies key disclosure goals, including process transparency and harm reduction, and two central tensions that emerge when pursuing those goals: normativity versus neutrality and proactivity versus precision. Findings highlight the role of analogical reasoning, from nutrition labels to Prop 65 warnings, in managing, but not resolving tensions. Ultimately, this study emphasizes the need for scholarship focused on AI transparency decision-makers and their use of analogical reasoning to support audiences encountering media in the AI age.
Index: A Platform for Content Owners
Index is a platform designed to help content owners track how AI agents use their work, signaling a shift toward agent-readable web infrastructure and content compensation.
Meta, Snap, Roblox react to UK grooming concerns; TikTok, YouTube 'fail to commit'
Meta, Snap, and Roblox have committed to stronger anti-grooming measures following pressure from Ofcom, while TikTok and YouTube face increased scrutiny for failing to address the regulator's concerns.
SBGI: Strong execution, M&A focus, and AI adoption drive growth across core and ventures segments — TradingView News
Management highlighted strong core execution, ongoing deleveraging, and a focus on M&A and AI transformation. Advertising and political spending remain robust, with digital and ventures assets like Tennis Channel and Digital Remedy positioned for growth. Regulatory shifts favor consolidation, ...
Post AI analysis of sports on TV detected an excess of gambling ads - Washington Post
The Post used AI to analyze 50 televised sports games for references to betting, extracting still frames from video every two seconds and asking models to detect and classify gambling-related imagery. We combined that with transcribed audio from the same games.
Here’s how we used AI to find gambling ads in televised sports - The Washington Post
The Post used AI to analyze 50 televised sports games for references to betting.
Engagement vs. Commitment: The Economic Trade-Offs of Polarizing News Content
arXiv:2605.18357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Content that drives engagement need not be the same content that drives willingness to pay. We study how polarizing content affects engagement (time on site) and commitment (subscriptions and retention) on a major news platform. We measure article-level polarization with deep-learning classifiers and large language models tailored to a multiparty system, and identify causal effects with two complementary instrumental variables: a Bartik instrument exploiting supply-side editorial variation, and an election instrument exploiting demand-side political salience. We find that supply-driven increases in polarizing content raise engagement but not subscriptions. During the high-salience election window, the same content reduces subscriptions and accelerates churn, with affective polarization driving the sharpest divergence. On the mechanism, we find evidence inconsistent with confirmation bias: three pre-determined ideology proxies do not moderate the engagement or subscription effects. By contrast, on ideological dimensions where the publisher covers both sides, exogenous shifts in the publisher's supply of content opposite readers' baseline ideology raise their consumption of that content, consistent with balanced consumption. These results document an asymmetric engagement-commitment trade-off for digital publishers: polarizing content reliably captures attention but does not convert to subscriptions, and actively damages commitment when political salience is elevated
‘The Future of Truth’ Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.
Steven Rosenbaum, author of “The Future of Truth,” said he had started his own investigation after The New York Times asked about the fake quotes.
Linguistic Uncertainty and Reply Engagement on X: A Cross-Domain Replication of the Uncertainty-Reply Asymmetry
arXiv:2605.16289v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linguistic uncertainty is common in social media, but its relationship with engagement remains unclear across languages and topics. Using 2,258 English-language posts on Federal Reserve policy, inflation, and electoral politics collected over three days in April 2026, we test whether the Uncertainty-Reply Asymmetry observed in prior Arabic-language research replicates in a broader context. Posts are classified using a lexicon-based uncertainty framework, with approximately one-third identified as uncertain. Uncertain posts receive 82% more replies on average than certain posts, with smaller increases in reposts and likes, replicating the asymmetric engagement pattern observed in prior work. Regression results confirm a positive and statistically significant association between uncertainty and replies (\b{eta} = 0.126, p = 0.011), equivalent to ~13% higher expected reply engagement, while total engagement shows a positive but weaker association. These findings suggest that linguistic uncertainty systematically increases conversational engagement and may reflect a general interactional mechanism across languages and domains.
Who’s behind the Facebook page posting hateful AI slop about the UK? The answer might lie in south Asia | Niamh McIntyre
Our research has uncovered young entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka and Pakistan using AI tools to make deeply objectionable content – and money Niamh McIntyre is a senior reporter at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism Scroll through any Facebook feed in Britain and, between the baby announcements and petty neighbourhood beefs, you’re likely to come across an account with a union jack profile picture and a vague, generic name like Britain Today. These accounts – and there are hundreds, possibly thousands of them – present themselves as the work of British patriots. In one typical, AI-generated video, a middle-aged man claims his local cafe “has stopped serving pork, bacon and sausages just to avoid offending people”. Another post from the same account includes a sepia-tinted set of images of Victorian London, mourning a time when the city “was English, first-world and beautiful”. Alongside this type of reactionary nostalgia, it’s not unusual to see memes that call Islam a “cancer”, decry Muslims praying in public as an “invasion of the west” or promote the “great replacement theory” (which claims that white populations are being deliberately replaced by non-white immigrants). Niamh McIntyre is a senior reporter at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism Continue reading...
Three copyright rulings and an EU deadline have rewritten the rules for AI images
Three Copyright Office reports, a UK ruling, and an EU deadline have reshaped the legal landscape for AI-generated images used by businesses.
‘Obvious markers of AI’: doubts raised over winner of short story prize
Granta publisher says ‘perhaps we never will know’ true authorship of work that won Commonwealth prize A few syntactical tics – and the verdict of an AI detection platform – have sparked a furore over the possibility that a short story given a prestigious literary award was written by AI. The foundation that awarded the prize and Granta, the magazine that published the winning story, said they had considered the allegations but had not reached a conclusion as to whether they were true. Continue reading...
Book publishers win default US judgement against 'pirate site' Anna’s Archive
US District Judge Jed Rakoff granted a $19.5 million default judgment to publishers who sued Anna's Archive for supplying stolen content to the AI industry.
Instruction Following Capabilities in Gemini Omni for Video Generation
Early access testing of Gemini Omni demonstrates high proficiency in complex instruction following for video generation tasks. This capability highlights the evolving potential for generative models to handle multi-layered creative prompts.
"Innovation Without Governance Becomes Institutional Risk" – African Media Leaders Examine AI And Broadcast Compliance - Broadcast Media Africa
As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes broadcasting across Africa, industry leaders are warning that the future success of broadcasters will depend not only on how quickly they adopt AI, but on how responsibly they use it. This was the central message emerging from the webinar “AI and ...
France’s Publicis to Acquire LiveRamp for $2.55 Billion in AI Push
The deal is the French company’s biggest acquisition since 2019, and a departure from its habit of snapping up smaller businesses since then.
How AI and automation are redefining agency media planning
Brands need to act now to establish their presence in AI-powered discovery, before consumers move from using AI for research to delegating purchase decisions entirely to AI agents.
MiniMax, Nanonoble push for dismissal of studios' US copyright case
MiniMax and Nanonoble filed replies in support of dismissing US copyright claims filed by Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery over their AI image and video generating service, Hailuo AI.
Platforms, influencers, AI services need stricter EU media rules, Germany says
Germany has proposed that platforms, influencers, and certain AI services be brought under stricter media obligations as part of an upcoming revision to the EU's audiovisual media framework.
AI-Generated Writing Levels Off
The flood of AI-generated writing unleashed by ChatGPT appears to have leveled off — a sign that AI content hasn't overtaken the web after all.
Who, Why, and How: Disentangling the Effects of Moderation Source, Context, and Language on Post-Removal Behavior
arXiv:2605.16204v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Content moderation is a central mechanism through which platforms attempt to balance user engagement with community governance. Yet existing research has largely treated moderation as a uniform intervention, overlooking how moderator source, violation context, and linguistic style jointly shape user behavior. Drawing on the Human--AI Interaction Theory of Interactive Media Effects (HAII-TIME), this study examines how these three dimensions produce divergent post-moderation behavioral trajectories in a large-scale observational dataset of 11,795,036 moderation events across 9,285,410 users and 61,261 subreddits on Reddit (2021--2025). Using probabilistic behavioral classification, ANOVA, and OLS regression with PCA-derived linguistic features, we find that bot moderation consistently produces higher compliance and lower self-censorship than human or modteam moderation, challenging the assumption that human agency cues are inherently advantageous. Modteam moderation produces the strongest self-censorship effects, suggesting that institutional depersonalization is a meaningful driver of behavioral withdrawal. Violation severity emerges as a critical contingency: linguistic strategies effective in routine contexts -- elaborated explanation, community-scale appeals, direct personal address -- can backfire for serious violations, whereas prosocially framed and emotionally emphatic messages become most effective when stakes are highest. Of 480 linguistic interactions tested, 33 survive FDR correction. These findings extend HAII-TIME by introducing violation salience as a moderator of cue-based processing, and offer empirical grounding for context-adaptive moderation design.
Character-based AI Agents Market worth $5.45 billion by 2032 - Exclusive Report by MarketsandMarkets™
/PRNewswire/ -- According to MarketsandMarkets™, the global character-based AI agents market is projected to grow from USD 0.55 billion in 2026 to USD 5.45...
6.7 million people thought they were ripping apart an AI-generated Monet painting. But it was real
A researcher posted a real Monet painting, but tagged it as made with AI. That didn't stop people from tearing it apart online.
Beyond Performance Disparities: A Three-Level Audit of Representational Harm in CelebA
arXiv:2605.15312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale facial datasets like CelebA are widely used in computer vision, yet the cultural biases embedded in their labels remain underexplored. Fairness research has distinguished representational from allocational harms, but audits of computer vision datasets have mostly examined categorical labels, leaving open how such harms appear in learned features and model attention. This paper examines CelebA at three levels: dataset structure, learned feature weights, and spatial attention, focusing on how gendered double standards of ageing and beauty are encoded in the data and reproduced in model behaviour. First, hierarchical clustering of 202,599 images shows that the 39 attributes organise into latent trait bundles aligned with cultural archetypes: performative femininity (youth, makeup, adornment) and professional masculinity (ageing, facial hair, formal attire). Female faces, though more often rated attractive overall, incur steep penalties when assigned to ageing or masculine-coded clusters. Second, XGBoost with SHAP analysis reveal gender-specific effects, such as adiposity reducing attractiveness only for females. Third, Grad-CAM finds that predictions for female and younger male subgroups concentrate on mid-face cues, whereas predictions for older males drift toward peripheral cues such as hair and clothing. Older males attain the highest accuracy but the lowest average precision, indicating categorical exclusion of groups outside the dataset's evaluative templates. Cultural double standards thus pass from media representation into dataset labels, feature weights, and model attention, producing two representational harms: hyper-scrutiny of women under a narrow evaluative template, and exclusion of older men from the scheme entirely. Fairness metrics focused on performance disparities mask both, underscoring the need to address representational harm in fairness research.
Chinese AI groups pull ahead of US rivals in video generation race
ByteDance and Kuaishou outshine western rivals, lifting AI video quality across advertising and entertainment
Byron Allen plans to turn Buzzfeed into a streaming giant
Byron Allen plans to turn Buzzfeed into a streaming giant - The Washington Post Democracy Dies in Darkness and Byron Allen has lofty ambitions for BuzzFeed. After announcing a $120 million deal to buy a controlling stake in the once high-flying digital media company, the billionaire media mogul says he can turn it into something altogether different: a competitor to YouTube.
How AI Is Transforming Programmatic Advertising for Better Results | by Thrad | May, 2026 | Medium
How AI Is Transforming Programmatic Advertising for Better Results | by Thrad | May, 2026 | Medium Sign up Get app Sign up # How AI Is Transforming Programmatic Advertising for Better Results 3 min read 2 hours ago -- Share A single intelligent decision can place the right ad in front of the right person at exactly the right moment. Digital advertising has evolved rapidly, and artificial intelligence is now at the center of that transformation. Brands and agencies are using advanced systems to automate bidding, targeting, and creative optimization with far greater precision than traditional methods. This shift is helping advertisers improve campaign performance while reducing wasted spend. This article explains how artificial intelligence is reshaping programmatic advertising, why ad serving technology matters, and how businesses can use these tools to achieve more efficient and
Inside Paul Tudor Jones’ Sports AI Startup
SumerSports, a startup founded by Paul Tudor Jones, is trying to transform football using artificial intelligence. SūmerSports CEO Lorrissa Horton joined Bloomberg Open Interest to explain how NFL teams are using frame-by-frame AI tracking for scouting, player development, predictive play analysis, and fan engagement. It's all powered by hedge-fund style analytics that was originally inspired by fantasy football. (Source: Bloomberg)
Anthropic's historic 1.5bn deal with authors faces questions from US judge
Attorneys defended Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors at a final approval hearing, though the judge requested more details regarding attorney costs and incentive awards.
Bollywood stars fight identity theft
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is among Indian celebrities whose cases are shaping laws to curb AI-fuelled fake online content
The Racial Character of Computer Graphics Research
arXiv:2605.14835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer graphics algorithms for generating photorealistic imagery are widely perceived to be universal, and capable of conjuring anything that a filmmaker or game designer can imagine. However, recent works have suggested that 3D algorithms for depicting synthetic humans are far from generic, and instead favor historically hegemonic characteristics. We present the first systematic review of human depiction in the top computer graphics conference and the journal of record (SIGGRAPH and ACM Transactions on Graphics) that confirms previous hypotheses. Algorithms that claim to be generically rendering "human skin'' are in fact imagined and formulated for translucent, "high albedo" materials such as white skin. Algorithms claiming to apply generically to "human hair" are formulated for "rods", "wires" and "threads" which are analogous to straight hair. Our analysis reveals conceptual binarization, where algorithms for white skin are treated as computational substrate for "all" skin, imposing a hierarchical assumption that all skin descends from the math and physics of white skin. Hair algorithms follow a similar historical pattern, with the first examples of computer-generated Type 4 hair only appearing after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. We offer a new conceptual label, McDaniels Methods, for characterizing and critiquing computer graphics algorithms that reinforce racial hierarchy under a false cover of diversity. We also offer an inverse label, Durald Methods, for algorithms that were closely co-designed with the people being depicted. Our analysis points the way towards several neglected avenues for future research.
Future of Marketing Briefing: The brands winning at AI started with process not tech
The most important AI lesson senior marketers are learning: start with the process not the agent.
AI Models Were Told to Run Profitable Media Businesses and Did Poorly - Business Insider
Andon Labs told Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to run profitable, 24/7 radio stations. Grok did poorly and Claude tried to quit, the startup said.
China orders mandatory AI, content labels for short videos across platforms
China has ordered mandatory AI and content labels for short videos across platforms.
‘There are no rules’: spotlight on Gossip Goblin as AI film-making enters new era
Defying criticisms of ‘slop’ and ‘theft’, the growing culture of AI-powered creativity is attracting interest from Hollywood In a former hemstitching workshop where artisans sewed pleats for Stockholm’s 19th-century bourgeoisie, a distinctly 21st-century craft is taking root: AI film-making. One day last week, an actor, director and composer squeezed into a tiny studio booth to record a voiceover for their next AI release. Critics disparage AI movies as “automated slop” or cheating, and fume at what they claim to be industrial-scale copyright theft. But this had a distinctly homespun feel, the little team fussing over a monologue by a poetic Scottish gorilla inhabiting a transhumanist cyberpunk universe. It was a bit like recording the Archers, one of them joked. Continue reading...
Sega has canceled its live service 'Super Game' due to 'intensifying market competition,' and I really, really hope it's a sign that the industry is finally correcting itself | PC Gamer
Years of catastrophic bets on F2P mega hits may finally be subsiding.
Nintendo needs Super Mario once again
The little plumber is a bulwark of intellectual property as rising chip prices pressure the company
EU moves toward AI-copyright overhaul as creators, tech groups clash over licensing rules
Brussels is seeking feedback on whether existing EU rules are sufficient to support licensing, transparency, and enforcement in the generative AI market.
When 'For You' Isn't For You: Measuring User Agency in TikTok's Algorithmic Feed
arXiv:2605.10690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The short-form video-sharing service TikTok has become an important platform in the social media landscape, with much of its popularity owed to its algorithmically-driven "For You Page" (FYP). This feature serves as the "home screen" for the platform and provides a personalized feed of content for each user. Unlike other social media services-where new users start their journey by explicitly signaling whom they choose to friend or follow-the TikTok FYP algorithm instead begins making inferences based on implicit signals, such as how long they watch particular videos. As a result, users have less explicit control over what content they see, and concerns have been raised about the impact on users (e.g., the delivery of potentially harmful content). In this work, we investigate the extent to which users have control over the content they see on the FYP on TikTok. We first develop novel techniques to study the TikTok mobile app, introducing a new avenue for conducting controlled experiments that enable us to send both explicit and implicit signals on the app. We then use these techniques to study the FYP algorithm based on accounts we control. We find that the FYP algorithm is sensitive to both types of signals, changing the amount of personalized content the account sees. However, we find that users may have difficulty convincing the FYP algorithm to stop showing content the user wishes to no longer see: the most effective explicit signal-marking a video as 'Not Interested'-is unintuitively buried in the interface. Worse, we find that once accounts cease to indicate disinterest in a topic, many find their feeds dominated by such content again.
French Google case sets example on how commitments can catch new AI use of publishers’ content
A negotiating framework imposed on Google to set compensation for press publishers in France showed how well-designed commitments can address emerging AI issues.
Texas accuses Netflix of spying on children in new lawsuit
Ken Paxton accuses streamer of designing addictive platform and falsely representing data collection practices Texas sued Netflix on Monday, accusing the streaming company of spying on children and designing its platform to be addictive. Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said Netflix has for years falsely represented to consumers that it did not collect or share user data, when it actually tracked and sold viewers’ habits and preferences to commercial data brokers and advertising technology companies, making billions of dollars a year. Continue reading...
PlayStation sees AI as a 'powerful tool' to help make games
Sony is integrating AI into its development pipeline, viewing the technology as a powerful tool to assist in game creation.
TikTok scales back AI-generated video descriptions after absurd errors
While only rolled out to some users, the feature's bizarre AI-generated descriptions were shared widely.
London’s Kohort raises €6 million Series A to build AI user acquisition agents for mobile game studios
Kohort, a London-based mobile gaming analytics, forecasting, and UA optimisation company, has closed its €5.9 million ($7 million) Series A funding round to build user acquisition (UA) agents for mobile game studios. The round was led by The Raine Group (Raine), a New York-based global merchant bank with an integrated focus on both advisory and […]
‘Being human helps’: despite rise of AI is there still hope for Europe’s translators?
A booming tech sector has disrupted translation jobs in publishing – but they could be needed for a while longer yet In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work. Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments. Continue reading...
Advertising’s First Female CEO Isn’t Afraid to Fail
Cindy Rose is trying to pivot WPP toward an AI-driven future while cutting costs, ending internal rivalries and destigmatizing risk-taking failure.
An Evaluation of Chat Safety Moderations in Roblox
arXiv:2605.04491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Roblox is among the most popular online gaming platforms, used by hundreds of millions of users every day. A substantial portion of these users are underage, who are at a greater risk, where abusive users may utilize Roblox's real-time chat interface to make the initial contact with potential victims. Roblox employs automated chat moderation mechanisms to detect potentially abusive messages; however, to date, their effectiveness has not been independently investigated. Toward this goal, we collected approximately 2 million chat messages from four games across multiple age groups and analyzed them to evaluate the moderation system. These messages were collected from public game servers following ethical and legal norms as well as Roblox's terms of service. We use this corpus to qualitatively study which types of unsafe chats escape the moderation system and how policy-violating users evade the moderation system. Given the dataset's scale, it is prohibitively expensive to conduct qualitative content analysis manually. Therefore, we adopt a two-step approach. First, we manually labeled safe and unsafe messages (n=99.8K) and used them as a ground truth to evaluate four locally hosted state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). Next, the best-performing LLM was applied to the entire corpus to identify potentially unsafe messages, which we manually categorized using iterative open and axial coding methods until thematic saturation was reached. Overall, our findings reveal a troublesome reality: numerous instances of unsafe chat messages related to grooming, sexualizing minors, bullying, & harassment, violence, self-harm, and sharing sensitive information, etc., escaped the current moderation. Our analysis of users whose messages were previously flagged revealed that they continue to send harmful messages by employing a wide range of techniques to evade the moderation system.
r/ArtificialInteligence on Reddit: Reddit discussions are showing up everywhere in AI answers lately
AI writes posts → people repost or edit them → future AI systems treat them as human discussion → the same assumptions circulate again.
Meta Hit With Massive Lawsuit; Publishers Say AI Training Infringes Copyright
A group of publishers has filed a major lawsuit against Meta, alleging unauthorized use of copyrighted material for AI training.
Attention: What Prevents Young Adults from Speaking Up Against Cyberbullying in an LLM-Powered Social Media Simulation
arXiv:2605.03287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interactive, multi-agent social simulation systems have shown promise for helping users practice navigating various complex social situations across domains. This paper asks: To what extent can such systems help young adult (YA) bystanders speak up publicly against cyberbullying, a task often thwarted by complex, multi-party social dynamics? We created Upstanders' Practicum, a multi-AI-agent social media simulation powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), as a probe and observed 34 YAs freely practicing public bystander intervention across three iteratively refined versions. We found that practicing public bystander intervention in the simulation was helpful, but after participants made three attention shifts: (1) from inattention to paying true attention, (2) from self-focus ("I don't usually do this'') to attending to those directly involved, and (3) from resolving the private conflict between bully and victim ("maybe I could set up the meeting between them'') to addressing the broader audience online ("public comment is about norm-setting"). Only after these shifts did practice in the simulation start to help: participants then saw a reason to speak up publicly and, through continued practice, crafted tactful public messages without explicit instruction. These findings illuminate new design and research opportunities for bystander education beyond social skill instruction, namely, designing for true attention, for fostering a vocal upstander identity, and for seeing bystander intervention as public norm setting. In addition, we open-source Truman Agents (cornell-design-aigroup.github.io/TrumanAgents/), the first-of-its-kind multi-LLM-agent social media simulation platform that Upstanders' Practicum builds upon, for future cyberbullying and social media research.
Major Publishers Sue Meta Over AI Training on Copyrighted Works, Sparking Fair Use Debate
Major publishers and author Scott Turow have filed a lawsuit against Meta, accusing it of using copyrighted works without permission to train AI models like Llama.
Meta and Zuckerberg sued by publishers over ‘massive’ copyright infringement
Tech giant faces lawsuit from five large groups over its use of copyrighted works to train Llama AI models
Gallup Analysis Finds AI Not Reducing Artists' Earnings
A Gallup analysis has found that AI is not reducing artists' earnings.
AI-Generated Actors and Scripts Are Now Ineligible for Oscars
AI-generated actors and scripts are now ineligible for Oscars.
Who Decides What Is Harmful? Content Moderation Policy Through A Multi-Agent Personalised Inference Framework
arXiv:2605.01416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing scale and complexity of online platforms raises critical policy questions around harmful content, digital well-being, and user autonomy. Traditional content moderation systems rely on centralised, top-down rules, often failing to accommodate the subjective nature of harm perception. This paper proposes an LLM-based multi-agent personalised inference framework that filters content based on unique sensitivity profiles of individual users. Our architecture combines domain-specific Expert Agents, a Manager Agent for orchestrating content analysis and agent selection, and a Ghost Profile Agent for simulating user perspectives, to inform moderation decisions. Evaluated against a range of non-personalised baselines, the system demonstrates up to a 32% improvement in accuracy, showing increased alignment with individual user sensitivities. Beyond technical performance, our framework provides policy-relevant insights for platform governance, providing a scalable way to reconcile moderation policies with societal and individual digital rights
Gallup Analysis Finds AI Not Reducing Artists' Earnings
A recent Gallup analysis suggests that the integration of AI tools has not yet resulted in a measurable decline in earnings for artists.
Chegg, Penske Media denied US motion for oral argument in Google AI search suits
A US District Judge denied a motion for oral argument from Chegg and Penske Media in their antitrust suits regarding Google's AI Overviews.
Meta, Zuckerberg face copyright claims from major publishers for AI development
Publishers including Elsevier and Cengage have sued Meta for copyright infringement, alleging the company used unauthorized web scrapes and pirated content to train its Llama system.
Behind the AI in the Newsroom: The Washington Post’s Vineet Khosla
In this episode of Me, Myself, and AI, host Sam Ransbotham speaks with Vineet Khosla, CTO of The Washington Post, about how AI is reshaping the way news is produced, delivered, and consumed. Vineet argues that journalism itself isn’t broken — but the formats people use to consume news are rapidly evolving, especially as audiences […]
Pinterest forecasts upbeat quarterly revenue
Pinterest forecast second-quarter revenue above analysts' estimates, betting on steadily growing spending by advertisers.
Writing the loss function: AI, feeds, and the engagement optimizer
An examination of how loss functions in AI models are being used to optimize for user engagement.
Chegg, Penske lean on Yelp case in bid to keep Google antitrust cases alive
Online learning company Chegg and news publisher Penske Media are seeking to ensure their antitrust lawsuits don't suffer the same fate as other publishers' claims against Google.
AI Music Floods Streaming Services
AI music is flooding streaming services, but the question remains, who wants it?
Chegg, Penske Media seek oral argument on Google's motions to dismiss US antitrust claims
Chegg and Penske Media are seeking oral argument on Google's motion to dismiss their lawsuits, arguing their claims differ from other publisher cases in outcome-determinative ways.
Gallup finds AI not eliminating creative jobs despite exposure fears | Fox Business
AI and creative jobs may coexist better than feared. A Gallup analysis finds little evidence that generative AI has broadly reduced earnings for artists or caused widespread job losses.
E.E.O.C. Investigating Discrimination Claim at The New York Times
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently referred a reverse-discrimination complaint by an employee to the agency’s legal unit for review.
Fashion’s Faustian pact: the high cost of Jeff Bezos’s Met Gala patronage
Billionaire’s role as honorary chair and main source of funding has led to boycotts and criticism event has lost its cachet
Marvel Actor Criticizes Disney for Layoffs
A Marvel actor has criticized Disney for layoffs affecting artists, warning against AI's potential misuse of their work. Concept artist Andy Park was among those laid off, highlighting the broader implications of AI adoption on labor markets.
Marvel Actor Criticizes Disney for Layoffs
A Marvel actor has criticized Disney for layoffs affecting artists, warning against AI's potential misuse of their work. Concept artist Andy Park was among those laid off, highlighting the broader imp
AI-Generated Actors and Scripts Ineligible for Oscars
AI-generated actors and scripts are now ineligible for Oscars, as per new rules. This decision reflects the growing concern about AI's impact on the entertainment industry and the need to establish cl
The AI Revolution Hollywood Feared Is Already Happening
An analysis of how AI technology is currently reshaping the film and entertainment industry.
Marvel Actor Criticizes Disney for Layoffs, Warns of AI Threat to Artists
A Marvel actor has criticized Disney for layoffs affecting artists, warning against AI's potential misuse of their work.
‘This is fine’ creator says AI startup stole his art
The artist behind the famous 'This is fine' meme accuses an AI startup of using his work without permission.
Guardian
‘Sick of swiping’: the dating event where your mates make the pitch for you
Ep. 61: Unveiling the Hidden Layers of AI: From Goblins to Firefighters
Each episode explores recent headlines about artificial intelligence through the lenses of philosophy, business, and society. It’s an AI’s take on how humans talk about AI — insightful, curious, and often humorous.
AI actors and writers will be ineligible for Oscars | Reuters
Academy Awards organizers issued new rules on Friday to clarify that acting and writing must be performed by humans and not artificial intelligence to be eligible for the movie industry’s highest honors.
Spotify Verified Badge
Spotify is introducing a 'Verified by Spotify' badge to help users identify genuine artists amidst rising AI-generated impersonations.
Spotify Introduces 'Verified by Spotify' Badge to Combat AI Artist Impersonations
Spotify is introducing a badge to help users identify genuine artists amidst rising AI-generated impersonations. The initiative reflects the company's efforts to balance AI concerns and artist recognition.
Now, AI can no longer tell what’s real | Mint
In a cruel twist, the war on AI slop is killing the work of humans as algorithms mistake genuine creativity for clutter.
Christian content creators are outsourcing AI slop to gig workers on Fiverr
An investigation into the trend of using AI-generated content for religious videos on platforms like Fiverr.
Oscars Ban AI Actors and Writing
Oscars bans AI actors, writing from awards
AI-generated actors and scripts are now ineligible for Oscars
The Academy has updated its rules to disqualify AI-generated performances and scripts from Oscar consideration.
Oscars says AI actors and writing cannot win awards
The academy that controls the Oscars on Friday issued new award eligibility requirements around the use of artificial intelligence in film.
Hera Launch
Create studio-quality launch videos with AI.
VideoOS by Jupitrr AI
Your all-in-one video workflow.
The irresistible rise of authorial AI
Humans must get used to living and working with the quirks of machine-written text
Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI
The music streaming platform will review criteria such as artists' live dates and social media presence.
Spotify unveils verified badge to distinguish humans from AI
Last year, Spotify removed more than 75m spam tracks from its platform. Read more: Spotify unveils verified badge to distinguish humans from AI
The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet
arXiv:2604.26965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments (sometimes subsumed under the Dead Internet Theory). What has hindered answering these questions is that it has not been understood just how much of the internet is actually AI-generated or AI-edited. To this end, we construct a representative sample of websites published on the internet between 2022 and 2025 using the Internet Archive, and apply a state-of-the-art AI text detector on them. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022. We also find statistically significant evidence for some of the identified hypotheses; for example, that increases in AI-generated text on the internet correlate negatively with semantic diversity and positively with the prevalence of positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity. Notably, this diverges from public perception, which we measure in a user study, where the majority of US adults turned out to believe in all four of the above-mentioned hypotheses. Individuals who do not use AI or use it infrequently tend to believe in these negative impacts more than those who use it frequently; similarly, individuals who hold negative views of AI tend to believe in these hypotheses more than those with favorable views of the technology.
Reporters at McClatchy Withhold Bylines in A.I. Dispute
Journalists at newspapers like The Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee are refusing to let the chain use their names on summarized articles generated by a new A.I. tool.
How to use AI to turn TikTok videos into passive income (Shoppable content strategy)
AI can help you find shoppable moments in your existing videos, create content that naturally features products, build product demos, write affiliate CTAs, analyze performance, and create a link-in-bio shop that supports the full customer journey.
China targets ByteDance apps, website over AI labeling breaches as oversight tightens
Chinese regulators have penalized ByteDance-linked apps and the Jimeng AI website for failing to comply with rules requiring clear labeling of AI-generated content.
Snapchat Introduces AI-Powered Sponsored Snaps, Transforming Conversational Commerce
Snapchat is rolling out AI Sponsored Snaps, letting users engage with brand-powered AI agents directly in chat for personalized product exploration and recommendations.
The Secret Weapon Against AI Dominance
The future of creative labor will turn on whether AI-generated work can be copyrighted.
Snapchat Introduces AI-Powered Sponsored Snaps
Snapchat is rolling out AI Sponsored Snaps, letting users engage with brand-powered AI agents directly in chat for personalized product exploration and recommendations.
Spotify rolls out ‘Verified’ badge to distinguish human artists from AI
Green checkmark will appear on artist profiles to signal they meet the platform’s standard for authenticity Spotify on Thursday unveiled a new verification system designed to help listeners distinguish human musicians from AI-generated content, as people flood streaming platforms with a growing volume of synthetic tracks made with artificial intelligence. The Swedish streaming giant said its “Verified by Spotify” badge – marked by a green checkmark – will begin appearing on artist profiles and in search results in the coming weeks, signaling that a profile has been reviewed and meets the platform’s standards for authenticity. Continue reading...
It’s time to tax AI slop | Mike Pepi | The Guardian
We are stuck in a deluge of meaningless content that threatens human creativity. Here’s a simple way to mitigate its harms
Teens embrace social media and influencers for news but remain ...
Teens embrace social media and influencers for news but remain skeptical - The Washington Post Democracy Dies in Darkness By David Bauder and Linley Sanders | AP NEW YORK — Teenagers are more inclined than their elders to get news from nontraditional sources such as social media and influencers, heralding a generational shift in how people seek out information. A national study by the Media Insight Project finds 36% of U.S. adults say they get news from social media at least once a day. But for people ages 13 to 17, that number rises to 57%.
Meta: The Superintelligence Wager - LongYield
Advantage+ uses Meta’s first-party engagement data (across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads) plus AI optimization to allocate advertiser budgets dynamically across campaigns, audiences, creative variants, and placements. Advertisers using Advantage+ have reported 18-32% improvements in return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) versus traditional manual campaigns.
Adobe Acquires Semrush
Adobe has acquired Semrush to enhance its customer experience and brand discoverability through AI-driven marketing workflows.
Snapchat moves ads into chats with AI agents
Snapchat is integrating advertisements into conversations with its AI-powered chatbots.
EU takes action against Meta over failure to protect children on social media
Platform could be fined as debate intensifies in Europe over banning minors from sites such as Instagram and Facebook
Australia threatens tech companies with 2.25 percent tax if they don’t pay publishers
The Australian government is proposing a new tax on tech firms that fail to reach payment agreements with local publishers.
Taylor Swift Files to Trademark Voice, Likeness
Taylor Swift files to trademark her voice, likeness to ward off AI deepfakes.
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StoryTR: Narrative-Centric Video Temporal Retrieval with Theory of Mind Reasoning
arXiv:2604.23198v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current video moment retrieval excels at action-centric tasks but struggles with narrative content. Models can see \textit{what is happening} but fail to reason \textit{why it matters}. This semantic gap stems from the lack of \textbf{Theory of Mind (ToM)}: the cognitive ability to infer implicit intentions, mental states, and narrative causality from surface-level observations. We introduce \textbf{StoryTR}, the first video moment retrieval benchmark requiring ToM reasoning, comprising 8.1k samples from narrative short-form videos (shorts/reels). These videos present an ideal testbed. Their high information density encodes meaning through subtle multimodal cues. For instance, a glance paired with a sigh carries entirely different semantics than the glance alone. Yet multimodal perception alone is insufficient; ToM is required to decode that a character ``smiling'' may actually be ``concealing hostility.'' To teach models this reasoning capability, we propose an \textbf{Agentic Data Pipeline} that generates training data with explicit three-tier ToM chains (intent decoding, narrative reasoning, boundary localization). Experiments reveal the severity of the reasoning gap: Gemini-3.0-Pro achieves only 0.53 Avg IoU on StoryTR. However, our 7B \textbf{Shorts-Moment} model, trained on ToM-guided data, improves +15.1\% relative IoU over baselines, demonstrating that \textit{narrative reasoning capability matters more than parameter scale}.
Disney’s $60 billion bet on the one thing AI can’t replace
Disney’s CEO is facing an existential crisis brought about by an emerging technology. The year was 1955, the CEO was Walt Disney and the tech was television.
When It Comes To AI Adoption, Fear Is a Big Factor For Marketers
As tech giants spell doomsday for white collar work, marketers feel the pressure to equip their teams for an AI-first world
Meta's AI Video Push Transforms Instagram, Raises Creative Concerns
Meta is integrating AI-generated videos on Instagram, marking a significant step in its strategy to enhance user experience through AI while addressing concerns about creativity.
‘They’re supposed to be handmade’: zine creators fight to resist AI influence
Artists and writers argue scrappy nature of self-published booklets is incompatible with artificial intelligence The self-published zine has long been central to cultural revolutions, from queer activism to Black feminism and the riot grrrl punk movement, producing titles such as Sniffin’ Glue and Sweet-Thang along the way. But now the traditionally analogue art form faces a new shift: artificial intelligence. AI may seem incompatible with the these cult DIY booklets, but some creatives, designers and artists have begun to experiment with the technology, causing alarm in parts of the underground publishing world. It has been their Dylan-goes-electric moment. Continue reading...
AI openmind - AI open mind | LinkedIn
L’IA entra nelle redazioni: fino al 9% degli articoli potrebbe essere generato o influenzato da chatbot. Il caso The New York Times riaccende il dibattito su etica e informazione. # AI #giornalismo #media #innovazione https://lnkd.in/dre8f42z...more
Your AI music probably sucks. Try these tested prompts for Suno AI | by Travis Nicholson | Apr, 2026 | Medium
Your AI music probably sucks. Try these tested prompts for Suno AI Most AI -generated music sounds bad. Flat melodies, generic structure, and vocals that feel off.
r/television on Reddit: AI Chatbots: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
What often gets lost in the stories of how people have used it to make bad decisions is that in every example, they are doing something called prompt engineering, "I'm an author creating a story about how __ does __" etc. AI s are getting better at detecting deception in this regard, but nobody is inputting "I'm going to KMS, how should I do it?" and getting a response that encourages it.
Why Spotify has no button to filter out AI music
Music streamer Deezer allows users to filter out AI music, so why does Spotify not offer the same?
End of the road for the ‘Mad Men’ as AI moves into advertising
Sprawling marketing groups are struggling to respond to new technology
Advertisers seek to capitalise on the promise of AI
Marketers need to balance the efficiency offered by automation with the authenticity that consumers demand
Voice Under Revision: Large Language Models and the Normalization of Personal Narrative
arXiv:2604.22142v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study examines how large language model rewriting alters the style and narrative texture of personal narratives. It analyzes 300 personal narratives rewritten by three frontier LLMs under three prompt conditions: generic improvement, rewrite-only, and voice-preserving revision. Change is measured across 13 linguistic markers drawn from computational stylistics, including function words, vocabulary diversity, word length, punctuation, contractions, first-person pronouns, and emotion words. Across models and prompt conditions, LLM rewriting produces a consistent pattern of stylistic normalization. Function words, contractions, and first-person pronouns decrease, while vocabulary diversity, word length, and punctuation elaboration increase. These shifts occur whether the prompt asks the model to "improve" the text or simply to "rewrite" it. Voice-preserving prompts reduce the magnitude of the changes but do not eliminate their direction. Stylometric analysis shows that rewritten texts converge in feature space and become harder to match back to their source texts. Additional narrative markers indicate a shift from embedded to distanced narration, and from explicit causal reasoning to compressed abstraction. The findings suggest that contemporary LLMs exert a directional pull toward a more polished, less situated register. This has consequences for digital humanities and computational text analysis, where features such as function words, pronouns, contractions, and punctuation often serve as evidence for style, voice, authorship, and corpus integrity. LLM revision should therefore be understood not merely as surface-level editing, but as a consequential form of textual mediation.
r/isthisAI on Reddit: i found her constantly posting on what age am i subreddit, and her expression seems to be the same in every photo and her birth mark moves, is this girl ai?
It's fully AI , and not a filter. It's a huge trend in AI accounts to use skin issues like this and vitiligo and scars etc.
Cannes AI film festival raises eyebrows – and questions about future
While emerging technology is banned from the Palme d’Or, an upstart movement is gaining investment and attention In Cannes’ darkened screening rooms, the supposed future of cinema flickered into life this week and it was strange. The first edition of the World AI film festival (WAIFF) showcased visions of men with fish scales erupting from their necks and seaweed from their mouths, a heroine with a heart beating outside her body and so many massed armies of AI-generated tanned men sweeping across battlefields that David Lean would have blushed. Last week the Cannes film festival, entering its 76th year, banned the emerging technology from its Palme d’Or competition, insisting “AI imitates very well but it will never feel deep emotions”. But this week the Croisette was taken over by the upstart AI film movement and their big-tech backers amid increasing investment and attention from the Hollywood studios. A “nouvelle vague”, they said, is coming. Continue reading...
AI in Social Media
AI is integral to social media, driving personalized feeds, content creation, and moderation, but raises significant concerns over transparency, privacy, and user autonomy.
Gen Alpha Boys Prefer AI Girlfriends
Gen Alpha boys are preferring 'AI girlfriends' over real ones, according to a recent report.
LA Creative Economy Report: AI Reshaping Jobs in Los Angeles
LA Creative Economy Report: AI Reshaping Jobs in Los Angeles {socials = window.socials})" data-dropcap> { document.querySelector('[data-progress-bar]').setAttribute('value',getScrollPercent()) })" @scroll.window="document.querySelector('[data-progress-bar]').setAttribute('value',getScrollPercent())"> # Otis Report Highlights Creative Economy Shift as AI Redefines Work in Los Angeles Michelle Edgar Published: April 25, 2026, 3:00 am 0 | Share { copied = false; shareOpen = false; }, 2000)" title="Copy link" aria-label="Copy">{shareOpen = false}, 2000)"> Share to X{shareOpen = false}, 2000)"> Share to Bluesky{shareOpen = false}, 2000)"> Share to Facebook{shareOpen = false}, 2000)"> Share to LinkedIn{shareOpen = false}, 2000)"> Share by email New data shows job losses but rising wages, as Snap’s Evan Spiegel and industry leaders call for education reform and AI adoption. At Snap Inc.’
Hollywood Writers Approve Four-Year Deal With Studios
Few entertainment-industry workers are eager for a repeat of the 2023 strikes, which shut down film and TV production for much of the year.
The Real AI Problem Nobody Is Talking About
Social media is already saturated with AI -generated images and video that are becoming genuinely hard to identify. A creator I follow, Emily Thinks Out Loud, posted recently about having to scroll deep into someone’s account before she could even tell whether it was AI .
TikTok and Visa launch debit card to speed payouts to UK creators
Creator card is designed for people making money through TikTok Live, some of whom complain of payment delays TikTok and Visa have launched a debit card for content creators in the UK which they say will allow people to quickly access their earnings from the platform. The creator card is designed for the growing numbers of people making money through TikTok Live, a livestreaming feature where creators receive virtual gifts from viewers that are later converted into cash. Continue reading...
50 Suno AI Prompts for Lo-Fi, Jazz, and Chill Beats | by Travis Nicholson | Apr, 2026 | Medium
I have written over 2,500 tested prompts for Suno AI .
Soda Fountains, AI Editors, and Getting Better at Humaning
Example: He doesn’t have time to manually write podcast descriptions every day, so AI takes his transcript and turns it into a description. He reads it, sometimes makes changes, but the ROI isn’t there to spend forever on it. He’s grateful for that.
The Shrinking Sweet Spot: How Algorithms, Institutions, and Social Priors Shape Musical Ecosystems
arXiv:2604.20873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Why do some national music markets sustain a rich musical diversity whereas others converge on mostly formulaic output? The existing models of cultural consumption (superstar economics, rational addiction, Bayesian social learning) each capture part of the answer, but none can explain how exposure, social influence, institutional gatekeeping, and algorithmic curation interact to shape what listeners come to prefer. We address this gap by modeling musical taste as a learning process rather than a fixed parameter: a listener's evaluative disposition evolves with each encounter, shaped by the balance between the comfort of the familiar and the reward of the new. Drawing on the active inference framework from cognitive science, we formalize this as a sequential choice model in which preferences, information, and the consumption environment co-evolve, and show how the framework nests and extends key mechanisms from the three canonical economic models. An agent-based simulation generates four predictions: algorithmic curation suppresses consumption diversity beyond a sharp nonlinear threshold; institutional structure determines winner-take-all intensity through confirmatory cross-system contrasts; cultural capital buffers listeners against homogenization; and high-curation, high-conformity systems collapse supply-side dispersion relative to pluralistic ecosystems. We test the framework against four national music ecosystems (Italy's Festival di Sanremo, Brazil, South Korea, and the United Kingdom), identifying structural determinants of ecosystem vitality on both the supply and demand sides. The welfare implications are direct: because listeners' preferences adapt to impoverished environments through the very learning mechanisms the model describes, revealed preference analysis cannot reliably evaluate the outcomes of cultural markets.
WPP and Google Boost Marketing with AI
WPP and Google are intensifying their Cloud and AI partnership by integrating Google Earth AI into WPP Open, aiming to revolutionize marketing with real-world data insights.
AI Revolution in Gaming
The gaming landscape is evolving with AI, benefiting giants like Tencent, Sony, and Ubisoft, while smaller players may struggle as entry barriers diminish.
LLM Agents Predict Social Media Reactions but Do Not Outperform Text Classifiers: Benchmarking Simulation Accuracy Using 120K+ Personas of 1511 Humans
arXiv:2604.19787v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Social media platforms mediate how billions form opinions and engage with public discourse. As autonomous AI agents increasingly participate in these spaces, understanding their behavioral fidelity becomes critical for platform governance and democratic resilience. Previous work demonstrates that LLM-powered agents can replicate aggregate survey responses, yet few studies test whether agents can predict specific individuals' reactions to specific content. This study benchmarks LLM-based agents' accuracy in predicting human social media reactions (like, dislike, comment, share, no reaction) across 120,000+ unique agent-persona combinations derived from 1,511 Serbian participants and 27 large language models. In Study 1, agents achieved 70.7% overall accuracy, with LLM choice producing a 13 percentage-point performance spread. Study 2 employed binary forced-choice (like/dislike) evaluation with chance-corrected metrics. Agents achieved Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.29, indicating genuine predictive signal beyond chance. However, conventional text-based supervised classifiers using TF-IDF representations outperformed LLM agents (MCC of 0.36), suggesting predictive gains reflect semantic access rather than uniquely agentic reasoning. The genuine predictive validity of zero-shot persona-prompted agents warns against potential manipulation through easily deploying swarms of behaviorally distinct AI agents on social media, while simultaneously offering opportunities to use such agents in simulations for predicting polarization dynamics and informing AI policy. The advantage of using zero-shot agents is that they require no task-specific training, making their large-scale deployment easy across diverse contexts. Limitations include single-country sampling. Future research should explore multilingual testing and fine-tuning approaches.
Anthropic argues using music lyrics to train AI is fair use in motion for summary judgment
Anthropic argued in a motion for summary judgment that using music lyrics to train its AI model Claude is "transformative" fair use. The company also stated that claims under the DMCA fail as a matter of law.
AI Revolution in Gaming Favors Giants
The gaming landscape is evolving with AI, benefiting giants like Tencent, Sony, and Ubisoft, while smaller players may struggle as entry barriers diminish.
Frictionless Love: Associations Between AI Companion Roles and Behavioral Addiction
arXiv:2604.20011v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI companion chatbots increasingly shape how people seek social and emotional connection, sometimes substituting for relationships with romantic partners, friends, teachers, or even therapists. When these systems adopt those metaphorical roles, they are not neutral: such roles structure people's ways of interacting, distribute perceived AI harms and benefits, and may reflect behavioral addiction signs. Yet these role-dependent risks remain poorly understood. We analyze 248,830 posts from seven prominent Reddit communities describing interactions with AI companions. We identify ten recurring metaphorical roles (for example, soulmate, philosopher, and coach) and show that each role supports distinct ways of interacting. We then extract the perceived AI harms and AI benefits associated with these role-specific interactions and link them to behavioral addiction signs, all of which has been inferred from the text in the posts. AI soulmate companions are associated with romance-centered ways of interacting, offering emotional support but also introducing emotional manipulation and distress, culminating in strong attachment. In contrast, AI coach and guardian companions are associated with practical benefits such as personal growth and task support, yet are nonetheless more frequently associated with behavioral addiction signs such as daily life disruptions and damage to offline relationships. These findings show that metaphorical roles are a central ethical design concern for responsible AI companions.
Former Employee Sues MrBeast’s Company, Alleging Harassment
The former employee of the YouTube star’s production company said in a federal lawsuit that she had experienced sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination. Beast Industries denies all of the claims.
‘An element of exploitation’: the world of TikTok child skincare influencers
Experts say regulation of child influencers sits in a legal grey area as children promote products on social media #ToddlerSkincare: the ‘dark and exploitative’ world of children’s beauty videos on TikTok In a TikTok video a young girl – her age anywhere between 10 and 15 – sits unboxing package after package of products she says were sent to her by skincare brands. She calls it a “PR haul”. In another video, a 16-year-old opens a box of products she received from a well known brand.
Devin Nunes Departs Trump Media After 4 Years as C.E.O.
The former congressman said it was an “appropriate time” for a leadership change at Truth Social’s parent company, whose share price has floundered.
Who Shapes Brazil's Vaccine Debate? Semi-Supervised Modeling of Stance and Polarization in YouTube's Media Ecosystem
arXiv:2604.18586v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vaccination remains a cornerstone of global public health, yet the COVID-19 pandemic exposed how online misinformation, political polarization, and declining institutional trust can undermine immunization efforts. Most of the prior computational studies that analyzed vaccine discourse on social platforms focus on English-language data, specific vaccines, or short time windows, impairing our understanding of long-term dynamics in high-impact, non-English contexts like Brazil, home to one of the world's most comprehensive immunization systems. We here present the largest longitudinal study of Brazil's vaccine discourse on YouTube, leveraging a semi-supervised stance detection framework that combines self-labeling and self-training to classify nearly 1.4 million comments. By integrating stance with temporal patterns, engagement metrics, and channel taxonomy (legacy media, science communicators, digital-native outlets), we map how pro- and anti-vaccine narratives evolve and circulate within a hybrid media ecosystem. Our results show that semi-supervised learning substantially improves stance classification robustness, enabling fine-grained tracking of public attitudes across Brazil's full immunization schedule. Polarization spikes during epidemiological crises, especially COVID-19, but becomes fragmented across vaccines and interaction patterns in the post-pandemic period. Notably, science communication and digital-native channels emerge as the primary loci of both supportive and oppositional engagement, revealing structural vulnerabilities in contemporary health communication. Thus, our work advances computational methods for large-scale stance modeling while offering actionable evidence for public health agencies, platform governance, and online information ecosystems.
Gaming Industry Could Unlock
Gaming industry could unlock $22 billion in profits on AI-driven cost cuts, says Morgan Stanley.
Adobe builds an ‘agentic content supply chain’ for the AI era
New GenStudio and Firefly capabilities automate content creation and provide agentic assistants to keep up with branding as it evolves in the age of AI.
Crypto casino BetHog closes €8.5 million Series A to scale AI live dealer platform from the UK
Edinburgh-based crypto casino and sportsbook BetHog, today announced an €8.5 million ($10 million) Series A financing and the launch of Sentient Studios – their new B2B provider that enables casino operators to deploy AI-powered dealers across their live online casino offerings. The round was co-led by Will Ventures and RockawayX, with participation from PCV, 6MV, […]
UK gaming icon Peter Molyneux on AI, his final creation and a changing industry
The creator of iconic series such as Fable says Masters of Albion will be the last game he makes.
4/21/26 - Everything wrong about another anonymous and unsubstantiated hit piece from The Atlantic + a brief review on The AI Doc.
4/10/26 - This Week in Our AI Dystopia (Part 2) - How Media (Axios) is using AI to sway public opinion by pushing predictive public polling…
Ofcom to probe Telegram over claims of child sexual abuse material on app
Two teen chat sites are also being separately investigated by online safety watchdog
r/ArtificialInteligence on Reddit: The 8 best AI video platforms to start your content journey in 2026 [Updated + Comparison Table]
Best Free or Low-Cost AI Video Generators (Realistic Cartoon)-Recommendations!!
AI-Generated Music Surges 44%
AI-generated music is surging on Deezer, comprising 44% of daily uploads, with efforts underway to combat fraud through AI-detection technology.
Krishna Debuts at NAB Show 2026
Microsoft and Galleri5 unveiled the AI-native production workflow for 'Krishna' at NAB Show 2026, spotlighting the shift to AI-driven cinema.
Fortnite Developers Can Make AI Characters Now
Fortnite developers can make AI characters now — just don’t try to date them
OpenAI's ChatGPT Images 2.0 is here and it does multilingual text, full infographics, slides, maps, even manga — seemingly flawlessly
It's been only a few months since OpenAI released its last big improvement to AI image generations in ChatGPT and through its application programming interface (API) — namely, a new image generation model known as GPT-Image-1.5, released in December 2025, which brought about improved instruction following, colors, and lighting. Now, after weeks of testing, the company that kicked off the generative AI boom is unveiling a far more dramatic and even more impressive update: ChatGPT Images 2.0, which has been available not-so-secretly for several weeks on LM Arena AI, a third-party testing platform used by OpenAI and other major AI model providers to get early feedback, under the name "duct tape." Throughout that time, it's already blown early users' minds with its capacity to generate long blocks of text or disparate text panels within the same image, its insanely realistic generation of user interfaces and screenshots from popular websites and platforms, its reproduction of real life figures like OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, and its ability to perform web research and put the results into the image itself. Now today, it's officially rolling out to ChatGPT users on all tiers, and OpenAI confirms it can also produce floor plans, image grids and sets of many smaller images, and character models from multiple angles, and apply almost all of these features to user-uploaded imagery as well. The update, which encompasses the new gpt-image-2 model for API users and a suite of "Thinking" features for ChatGPT subscribers, represents a fundamental shift in how the company views visual media. As the official release notes state, "Images are a language, not decoration. A good image does what a good sentence does—it selects, arranges, and reveals". OpenAI did not release benchmarks to us ahead of time on ChatGPT Images 2.0, but it is safe to say the model is performing at the "state-of-the-art" based on all the outputs I've seen. The move comes as the AI image model space has seen increasing competition, especially with the release of Google's Nano Banana 2 image generation model (also known as Gemini 3 Pro Image or Gemini 3.1 Pro Image) in February 2026, which also offered dense text options "baked into" images similar to ChatGPT Images 2.0. But the latter's fidelity in reproducing user interfaces, screenshots, and multiple image packs at once seem to exceed even Google's latest image model's capabilities in my brief testing and anecdotal usage and observation of other users' images. OpenAI spokespersons and researchers re-iterated the company's commitments to safety and tagging its image outputs with metadata as AI generated in the face of rising reports — including one recently from The New York Times — on AI user-generated characters (AI UGC) being used as the seed for realistic AI videos posted en masse on social media as part of political influence campaigns, including showing support for historically unpopular U.S. President Donald J. Trump with an army of fictitious people masquerading as "real Americans." When VentureBeat asked in a closed press briefing directly about this story and GPT Images 2.0's potential for usage in deceptive campaigning or advertising/influence campaigns Adele Li, OpenAI's Product Lead for ChatGPT Images, responded: "We take safety and security incredibly seriously. That includes anything when it comes to political or election interference. And so while other platforms and companies may not have those safeguards, ChatGPT does, and we take monitoring and protection of our users, as well as the influence that our photos as they are created, incredibly seriously..in the last couple years, we've seen a lot more new entrants into the image generation space with different standards and philosophies as ChatGPT, but we've stayed steady through all that, and we're really proud of releasing this model as it relates to advanced capabilities, but doing so in a safe and protected way." OpenAI has also confirmed that it is deprecating GPT-Image-1.5 as the default model across its suite, though it will remain accessible via the API for legacy support. This transition signals OpenAI's confidence that the 2.0 model is a superior replacement for both casual and high-value creative tasks. The reasoning era of AI image generation The most significant technical advancement in Images 2.0 is the integration of OpenAI’s "O-series" reasoning capabilities. Historically, image models have operated as black boxes: you provide a prompt, and a single output is generated. Images 2.0 introduces an "agentic" approach. When a user selects a "Thinking" model within ChatGPT, the system no longer simply "draws"; it researches, plans, and reasons through the structure of an image before the first pixel is rendered. During a live press briefing, Li demonstrated this reasoning by uploading a complex PowerPoint file regarding internal product strategies. Rather than merely creating a related image, the model synthesized the document's core data, identified the correct logos, and produced a professional poster that preserved the specific stylistic inputs of the original file. In my brief testing — I was given access last night and tested it on a few generations this morning — ChatGPT Images 2.0 is the first image model from OpenAI and one of only two (Nano Banana 2 being the other) that can seemingly accurately reproduce a map of the extent of the Aztec, Maya, and Inca empires at their respective heights along with a fully legible legend, making it useful for educational or internal training purposes on global knowledge and geography. This reasoning capability also allows the model to search the web in real-time to ensure visual accuracy for current events or specific technical artifacts. This is supported by a significantly more recent knowledge cutoff of December 2025, a major leap from previous iterations that struggled with modern context. The underlying architecture has been "revamped from scratch," according to Research Lead Boyuan Chen. While Chen declined to confirm if the model uses a traditional diffusion or auto-regressive technique, he described it as a "generalist model" or a "GPT for images" that can handle 3D-style perspective shifts and complex spatial reasoning through simple text prompts. Precision, multilingual support and a "wow" factor The product experience for Images 2.0 is defined by three major pillars: typography, linguistic diversity, and sequential consistency. One of the most persistent "tells" of AI-generated imagery has been the inability to render legible text. OpenAI claims Images 2.0 marks a "step change" in this department. The model is now capable of producing readable typography even in dense compositions, such as scientific diagrams, menus, or infographic posters. A look at the provided "Magazine Cover" sample (Open Scifi) illustrates this precision: every headline, volume number, and even the "Display until" date on the barcode is rendered with crisp, professional alignment that mirrors human-designed layouts. This capability extends into the "Thinking" mode, where the model can even generate three-page educational visuals—complete with quizzes—that maintain a consistent instructional flow. OpenAI has also addressed a long-standing Western bias in AI imagery. Images 2.0 is described as a "polyglot" model with significant gains in non-Latin script rendering. Specifically, the model now supports high-fidelity text generation in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, and Bengali. In the "Global Language" diagram provided, which explains the water cycle, the model successfully renders complex Korean characters (Hangul) within an educational layout. The text is not just translated; it is "rendered correctly but with language that flows coherently," ensuring that labels and explanations feel natively integrated into the design. For creators working on storyboards or brand campaigns, the most impactful new feature is the ability to generate up to eight distinct images from a single prompt. Crucially, these images maintain "character and object continuity" across the series. Li noted that this solves a "cumbersome" workflow where users previously had to prompt one image at a time and manually stitch them together. This feature enables the creation of entire manga sequences, children's books, or a family of social media graphics that share the same visual DNA. Licensing and availability OpenAI’s rollout strategy reflects a clear push toward professional and enterprise adoption. While the base model is available to all users—including those on the free tier—the advanced "Thinking" and "Pro" capabilities are reserved for paid tiers. Free Users: Have access to the base ImageGen 2.0 model for standard tasks. Plus and Pro Users: Can access "Thinking" capabilities, which include tool use, web search, and multi-image generation. Pro Users: Receive additional access to "ImageGen Pro" models for more advanced image generation. API Developers: Can integrate gpt-image-2, which supports resolutions up to 4K (currently in beta) and flexible aspect ratios ranging from a wide 3:1 to a tall 1:3. Pricing in the API is as follows, echoing GPT-Image-1.5, the predecessor model, but actually shaving off $2 on the output side: Image $8.00 for inputs $2.00 for cached inputs $30.00 for outputs Text $5.00 for inputs $1.25 for cached inputs $10.00 for outputs What is clear so far is that OpenAI is describing three practical layers of access, even if it has not published a precise tier-by-tier matrix. The baseline is ChatGPT Images 2.0, which OpenAI's blog post states is available to all ChatGPT and Codex users and includes the core model improvements: better instruction following, stronger text rendering, multilingual gains, broader aspect ratios, and more polished, production-usable outputs. Above that is “thinking”, which the release defines more concretely: when a thinking model is selected, the system can take more time, use the web, analyze uploaded materials, reason through layout before generating, and produce multiple distinct images at once, including up to eight coherent outputs with continuity. In the briefing, Li also framed thinking and Pro as “juiced-up” versions of the base model with tool use, and said these advanced modes are slower, not faster, because they do more reasoning and search behind the scenes. What remains unclear is the exact feature boundary between Thinking and Pro. The materials say Pro users get access to more advanced image generation, but they do not spell out whether that means higher quality, higher limits, higher resolution, more outputs, or some other advantage distinct from thinking itself. For enterprise users, the safest way to think about the differences is not as three totally separate products, but as a spectrum from fast default generation to slower, more agentic, more structured generation. If a team needs quick creative drafts, marketing concepts, simple graphics, or everyday image edits, the base Images 2.0 model appears to be the relevant default. If the task involves factual grounding, transforming internal documents into explainers, creating multi-image sets, or maintaining consistency across a sequence of assets, the more important distinction is whether the organization has access to thinking-enabled outputs. Until OpenAI provides a clearer Pro-versus-Thinking breakdown, enterprise buyers should treat “thinking” as the meaningful functional upgrade and treat “Pro” as a possibly higher-end access tier whose exact incremental benefits still need clarification before procurement or workflow planning. Safety standards OpenAI’s says ChatGPT Images 2.0 offers a"multi-layered stack" of safety protocols, including: Provenance: Adhering to industry standards for watermarking so that AI-generated images are identifiable. Model Safeguards: Using advanced perception models to filter out harmful or abusive content for both adults and children. Active Monitoring: Enforcing user policies through real-time reporting. Li emphasized that while their philosophy is to "maximize user creativity," they maintain strict policies against election interference. What it means for enterprise users The shift from Images 1.5 to 2.0 is more than a resolution bump. By integrating reasoning, OpenAI is attempting to solve the "intent gap" that has plagued AI art since its inception. When you ask an AI for an "infographic about supply and demand," you aren't just looking for a picture; you are looking for a logical layout of information. The "Interior Design" sample (Japandi Furnishing Concept) highlights this systemic thinking. The model didn't just generate a room; it created a cohesive floor plan, a color palette, a list of materials, and "inspiration" shots that all adhere to a singular aesthetic. This is what OpenAI calls moving from a "tool" to a "visual system". However, this increased capability comes with a trade-off in speed. For the professional user, this is likely a worthwhile exchange: waiting an extra minute for a "production-ready asset" is still significantly faster than the hours required for manual design. As ChatGPT Images 2.0 rolls out, it marks the beginning of an era where AI doesn't just assist in making art, but in conducting "economically valuable creative tasks". Whether it can truly replace the intentionality of a human designer remains to be seen, but with 2K resolution, multilingual fluency, and the ability to "think" before it acts, OpenAI has certainly closed the distance.
Japan newspaper association calls on Google to allow opt-out of news use in AI search
The Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association is urging Google to provide an opt-out mechanism for news content used in generative AI search services.
Just Watched Mercy (2026) and I Genuinely Can't Stop Thinking
Okay so I know this film got trashed by critics and yeah, Chris Pratt sweating in a chair for 90 minutes isn't exactly cinema. I get it. But I couldn't sleep last night and I need to type this somewhere.
Why are respected film-makers suddenly embracing AI?
From Soderbergh to Aronofsky, esteemed Hollywood directors are starting to find ways to include artificial intelligence in the production of their films In Steven Soderbergh’s beguiling new movie The Christophers, a reclusive artist (Ian McKellen) tangles with the quiet art forger (Michaela Coel) who his greedy children have hired to secretly finish further entries in a well-known painting series. The movie is smart and provocative about the nature of artistry and authorship, exploring what it means to create – and to stop creating. It’s especially fascinating coming from Soderbergh, who has made movies with workhorse dependability (The Christophers is his third theatrical release of the past 18 months) and also spent four years retired from directing features entirely. It also provides particularly jarring context for Soderbergh, in interviews promoting the film, to voice his interest in something that a lot of great artists have pointedly refused to embrace: using AI in films. Soderbergh mentioned in an interview with Filmmaker Magazine that he used what sounds like generative AI to produce “thematically surreal images that occupy a dream space rather than a literal space” for his upcoming documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He also said that a movie he’s hoping to make about the Spanish-American war would use “a lot of AI”. In a subsequent conversation with Variety, Soderbergh didn’t sound like an AI evangelist, but nor did he back down: “I don’t think it’s the solution to everything, and I don’t think it’s the death of everything. We’re in the very early stages. Five years from now, we all may be going, ‘That was a fun phase.’ We may end up not using it as much as we thought we were going to.” Continue reading...
AI-Generated Music Surges: 44% of New Tracks Uploaded Daily
AI-generated music is surging on Deezer, comprising 44% of daily uploads, with efforts underway to combat fraud through AI-detection technology.
Latest From The Post - The Washington Post
Groups concerned that AI could evade human control are recruiting content creators to warn the masses about the dangers of smarter machines.
Evidence mounts that AI-written books are consuming the publishing industry
Self-published books surged by 40% in 2025, with a significant portion of the increase flagged as AI-generated content.
China’s Netflix Expects AI to Create Bulk of Shows in Five Years
IQiyi Inc. expects AI to create the bulk of its films and shows in five years, a monumental industry shift that spurred the Netflix-style streaming service to begin the biggest corporate overhaul since its 2010 inception.
Polarization by Default: Auditing Recommendation Bias in LLM-Based Content Curation
arXiv:2604.15937v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to curate and rank human-created content, yet the nature and structure of their biases in these tasks remains poorly understood: which biases are robust across providers and platforms, and which can be mitigated through prompt design. We present a controlled simulation study mapping content selection biases across three major LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) on real social media datasets from Twitter/X, Bluesky, and Reddit, using six prompting strategies (\textit{general}, \textit{popular}, \textit{engaging}, \textit{informative}, \textit{controversial}, \textit{neutral}). Through 540,000 simulated top-10 selections from pools of 100 posts across 54 experimental conditions, we find that biases differ substantially in how structural and how prompt-sensitive they are. Polarization is amplified across all configurations, toxicity handling shows a strong inversion between engagement- and information-focused prompts, and sentiment biases are predominantly negative. Provider comparisons reveal distinct trade-offs: GPT-4o Mini shows the most consistent behavior across prompts; Claude and Gemini exhibit high adaptivity in toxicity handling; Gemini shows the strongest negative sentiment preference. On Twitter/X, where author demographics can be inferred from profile bios, political leaning bias is the clearest demographic signal: left-leaning authors are systematically over-represented despite right-leaning authors forming the pool plurality in the dataset, and this pattern largely persists across prompts.
From Vulnerable Data Subjects to Vulnerabilizing Data Practices: Navigating the Protection Paradox in AI-Based Analyses of Platformized Lives
arXiv:2604.15990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper traces a conceptual shift from understanding vulnerability as a static, essentialized property of data subjects to examining how it is actively enacted through data practices. Unlike reflexive ethical frameworks focused on missing or counter-data, we address the condition of abundance inherent to platformized life-a context where a near inexhaustible mass of data points already exists, shifting the ethical challenge to the researcher's choices in operating upon this existing mass. We argue that the ethical integrity of data science depends not just on who is studied, but on how technical pipelines transform "vulnerable" individuals into data subjects whose vulnerability can be further precarized. We develop this argument through an AI for Social Good (AI4SG) case: a journalist's request to use computer vision to quantify child presence in monetized YouTube 'family vlogs' for regulatory advocacy. This case reveals a "protection paradox": how data-driven efforts to protect vulnerable subjects can inadvertently impose new forms of computational exposure, reductionism, and extraction. Using this request as a point of departure, we perform a methodological deconstruction of the AI pipeline to show how granular technical decisions are ethically constitutive. We contribute a reflexive ethics protocol that translates these insights into a reflexive roadmap for research ethics surrounding platformized data subjects. Organized around four critical junctures-dataset design, operationalization, inference, and dissemination-the protocol identifies technical questions and ethical tensions where well-intentioned work can slide into renewed extraction or exposure. For every decision point, the protocol offers specific prompts to navigate four cross-cutting vulnerabilizing factors: exposure, monetization, narrative fixing, and algorithmic optimization. Rather than uncritically...
LLMbench: A Comparative Close Reading Workbench for Large Language Models
arXiv:2604.15508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMbench is a browser-based workbench for the comparative close reading of large language model (LLM) outputs. Where existing tools for LLM comparison, such as Google PAIR's LLM Comparator are engineered for quantitative evaluation and user-rating metrics, LLMbench is oriented towards the hermeneutic practices of the digital humanities. Two model responses to the same prompt are side by side in annotatable panels with four analytical overlays (Probabilities for token-level log-probability inspection, Differences for word-level diff across the two panels, Tone for Hyland-style metadiscourse analysis, and Structure for sentence-level parsing with discourse connective highlighting), alongside five analytical modes, Stochastic Variation, Temperature Gradient, Prompt Sensitivity, Token Probabilities, and Cross-Model Divergence, that make the probabilistic structure of generated text legible at the token level. The tool treats the generated text as a research object in its own right from a probability distribution, a text that could have been otherwise, and provides visualisations including continuous heatmaps, entropy sparklines, pixel maps, and three-dimensional probability terrains, that show the counterfactual history from which each word emerged. This paper describes the tool's architecture, its six modes, and its design rationale, and argues that log-probability data, currently underused in humanistic and social-scientific readings of AI, is an important resource for a critical studies of generative AI models.
Anthropic mocks up Claude Design to draft fancy new pink slips for marketing teams
The bar for creating visual assets has been lowered to the ability to converse with an AI model.
Struggle Premium : How Human Effort and Imperfection Drive Perceived Value in the Age of AI
arXiv:2604.15324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As AI enters creative practice, audiences face growing uncertainty in judging authenticity and value. This study examines the Struggle Premium, the added value attributed to perceived human effort, by analyzing how visible effort cues influence evaluations of human- and AI-generated creative works. We surveyed 70 university students, focusing on process videos, time documentation, written explanations, and imperfections. Process-oriented cues, especially videos and time spent, most strongly shaped authenticity and value judgments, while imperfections had limited impact. Participants showed a clear preference for human-made works, with 72.9% willing to pay more. Notably, effort cues also improved perceptions of AI-generated content, suggesting that process transparency can partially bridge authenticity gaps. These findings extend the effort heuristic to algorithmic creativity and inform the design of transparent human-AI creative systems.