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"The combination of software and IP in every device is a sea-change for the organization of our society. As firms have become increasingly concentrated - as monopolies have emerged in every sector - they have also figured out how to infuse their products with just enough software that they can invoke IP to control their competitors, critics, and customers. These are market power monopolies backstopped by creators' monopolies, which create IP rights that supercharge their market power."

"Because YouTube is the dominant player in the online video market, its choices dictate the norms of the whole industry. And unfortunately for independent creators, YouTube has proven to be more interested in appeasing large copyright holders than protecting free speech or promoting creativity. Through its automatic copyright filter, Content ID, YouTube has effectively replaced legal fair use of copyrighted material with its own rules."

"DATA LEVERAGE CAN be deployed through at least four avenues: direct action (for instance, individuals banding together to withhold, "poison," or redirect data), regulatory action (for instance, pushing for data protection policy and legal recognition of "data coalitions"), legal action (for instance, communities adopting new data-licensing regimes or pursuing a lawsuit), and market action (for instance, demanding large language models be trained only with data from consenting creators). "

"Next year's elections in Britain and the US could be marked by a wave of AI-powered disinformation, experts have warned, as generated images, text and deepfake videos go viral at the behest of swarms of AI-powered propaganda bots. Sam Altman, CEO of the ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, told a congressional hearing in Washington this week that the models behind the latest generation of AI technology could manipulate users."

"Racists on the notorious troll site 4chan are using a powerful new and free AI-powered image generator service offered by Microsoft to create antisemitic propaganda, according to posts reviewed by Bellingcat. Users of 4chan, which has frequently hosted hate speech and played home to posts by mass shooters, tasked Bing Image Creator to create photo-realistic antisemitic caricatures of Jews and, in recent days, shared images created by the platform depicting Orthodox men preparing to eat a baby, carrying migrants across the US border (the latter a nod to the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory), and committing the 9/11 attacks."

"No prominent developer of AI foundation models - a list including companies like OpenAI and Meta - is releasing sufficient information about their potential impact on society, determines a new report from Stanford HAI (Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence). Today, Stanford HAI released its Foundation Model Transparency Index, which tracked whether creators of the 10 most popular AI models disclose information about their work and how people use their systems. Among the models it tested, Meta's Llama 2 scored the highest, followed by BloomZ and then OpenAI's GPT-4. But none of them, it turned out, got particularly high marks."

"On Mar 16, 2023, The Copyright Office initiated an effort to investigate copyright law and policy concerns related to Generative AI. "This initiative is in direct response to the recent striking advances in generative AI technologies and their rapidly growing use by individuals and businesses. The Copyright Office has received requests from Congress and members of the public, including creators and AI users, to examine the issues raised for copyright, and it is already receiving applications for registration of works including AI-generated content.""

"The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing "content creators," and algorithmically manipulated junk. It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life - all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators."

"It is too late to stop the emergence of AI. Instead, we need to think about what we want next, how to design and nurture spaces of knowledge creation and communication for a human-centric world. Search engines need to act as publishers instead of usurpers, and recognize the importance of connecting creators and audiences. Google is testing AI-generated content summaries that appear directly in its search results, encouraging users to stay on its page rather than to visit the source. Long term, this will be destructive."

"Microsoft researchers said VALL-E 2 was capable of generating "accurate, natural speech in the exact voice of the original speaker, comparable to human performance," in a paper that appeared June 17 on the pre-print server arXiv. In other words, the new AI voice generator is convincing enough to be mistaken for a real person - at least, according to its creators."

"Users who once came to Facebook to connect with friends and family are increasingly complaining of random, spammy, junk content - much of it apparently generated by artificial intelligence - showing up in their feeds. Sometimes it's obviously fake, AI-generated images, like the now-infamous "Shrimp Jesus." Other times, it's old posts from real creators that look like they're being reshared by bot accounts for engagement. In some cases, it's pages sharing streams of seemingly benign but random content - memes or movie clips, shared every few hours."

"According to a new report from 404Media, as originally reported in Alexios Mantzarlis' Faked Up newsletter, the Crush AI modifier app receives the vast majority of its traffic from Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. According to Similarweb's data, last month Crush AI received more than a quarter of a million visits to its service - and roughly 90 percent of that traffic was from Meta's platforms. Crush AI makes it quite clear what the purpose of its service is in its advertisements. The company's ads include photos of real-life individuals like Instagram influencer and model Mikayla Demaiter and OnlyFans creator Sophie Rain. The ads boast that users can "upload a photo" and "erase anyone's clothes.""

"Both industries are at an impasse: tech insisting that enforcing copyright laws on AI is unfeasible and regressive, creatives that opting out is unworkable and unjust. It is up to government to foster a fair agreement in which both flourish. This is a pivotal moment for our cultural future. The artistic community has spoken. Now ministers must listen, take their concerns seriously and respond. We must protect our creators at all costs."

"London-born Stanford student Joshua Browder created DoNotPay initially to help people appeal against fines for unpaid parking tickets. Dubbed "the world's first robot lawyer", Browder later programmed it to deal with a wider range of legal issues, such as claiming for delayed flights and trains and payment protection insurance (PPI)."

"The problem, he believes, is that total decentralization inevitably increases wealth inequality. He pointed me to a simulation he designed last year in which bouncing balls demonstrate the theory that "the rich actually always get richer, no matter what." "

""Suffice to say, I do not feel the same enthusiasm around this technology," he wrote. "I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI - that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster."