Enlarge / Michael Jackson in concert, 1986. Sony Music owns a large portion of publishing rights to Jackson's music. (credit: Getty Images)

Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Records have sued AI music-synthesis companies Udio and Suno for allegedly committing mass copyright infringement by using recordings owned by the labels to train music-generating AI models, reports Reuters. Udio and Suno can generate novel song recordings based on text-based descriptions of music (i.e., "a dubstep song about Linus Torvalds").

The lawsuits, filed in federal courts in New York and Massachusetts, claim that the AI companies' use of copyrighted material to train their systems could lead to AI-generated music that directly competes with and potentially devalues the work of human artists.

Like other generative AI models, both Udio and Suno (which we covered separately in April) rely on a broad selection of existing human-created artworks that teach a neural network the relationship between words in a written prompt and styles of music. The record labels correctly note that these companies have been deliberately vague about the sources of their training data.

Enlarge / Features like Image Playground won't arrive in Europe at the same time as other regions. (credit: Apple)

Three major features in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia will not be available to European users this fall, Apple says. They include iPhone screen mirroring on the Mac, SharePlay screen sharing, and the entire Apple Intelligence suite of generative AI features.

In a statement sent to Financial Times, The Verge, and others, Apple says this decision is related to the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA). Here's the full statement, which was attributed to Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz:

Two weeks ago, Apple unveiled hundreds of new features that we are excited to bring to our users around the world. We are highly motivated to make these technologies accessible to all users. However, due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.

Specifically, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security. We are committed to collaborating with the European Commission in an attempt to find a solution that would enable us to deliver these features to our EU customers without compromising their safety.

It is unclear from Apple's statement precisely which aspects of the DMA may have led to this decision. It could be that Apple is concerned that it would be required to give competitors like Microsoft or Google access to user data collected for Apple Intelligence features and beyond, but we're not sure.

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu / Contributor | Anadolu)

Elon Musk is so opposed to Apple's plan to integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT with device operating systems that he's seemingly spreading misconceptions while heavily criticizing the partnership.

On X (formerly Twitter), Musk has been criticizing alleged privacy and security risks since the plan was announced Monday at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

"If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies," Musk posted on X. "That is an unacceptable security violation." In another post responding to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Musk wrote, "Don't want it. Either stop this creepy spyware or all Apple devices will be banned from the premises of my companies."

Enlarge (credit: bennymarty | iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus)

Adobe has promised to update its terms of service to make it "abundantly clear" that the company will "never" train generative AI on creators' content after days of customer backlash, with some saying they would cancel Adobe subscriptions over its vague terms.

Users got upset last week when an Adobe pop-up informed them of updates to terms of use that seemed to give Adobe broad permissions to access user content, take ownership of that content, or train AI on that content. The pop-up forced users to agree to these terms to access Adobe apps, disrupting access to creatives' projects unless they immediately accepted them.

For any users unwilling to accept, canceling annual plans could trigger fees amounting to 50 percent of their remaining subscription cost. Adobe justifies collecting these fees because a "yearly subscription comes with a significant discount."

Enlarge (credit: RicardoImagen | E+)

Photos of Brazilian kids—sometimes spanning their entire childhood—have been used without their consent to power AI tools, including popular image generators like Stable Diffusion, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned on Monday.

This act poses urgent privacy risks to kids and seems to increase risks of non-consensual AI-generated images bearing their likenesses, HRW's report said.

An HRW researcher, Hye Jung Han, helped expose the problem. She analyzed "less than 0.0001 percent" of LAION-5B, a dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. The dataset does not contain the actual photos but includes image-text pairs derived from 5.85 billion images and captions posted online since 2008.

Enlarge (credit: Boris Zhitkov | Moment)

The European Center for Digital Rights, known as Noyb, has filed complaints in 11 European countries to halt Meta's plan to start training vague new AI technologies on European Union-based Facebook and Instagram users' personal posts and pictures.

Meta's AI training data will also be collected from third parties and from using Meta's generative AI features and interacting with pages, the company has said. Additionally, Meta plans to collect information about people who aren't on Facebook or Instagram but are featured in users' posts or photos. The only exception from AI training is made for private messages sent between "friends and family," which will not be processed, Meta's blog said, but private messages sent to businesses and Meta are fair game. And any data collected for AI training could be shared with third parties.

"Unlike the already problematic situation of companies using certain (public) data to train a specific AI system (e.g. a chatbot), Meta's new privacy policy basically says that the company wants to take all public and non-public user data that it has collected since 2007 and use it for any undefined type of current and future 'artificial intelligence technology,'" Noyb alleged in a press release.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

We’ve been living through the generative AI boom for nearly a year and a half now, following the late 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But despite transformative effects on companies’ share prices, generative AI tools powered by large language models (LLMs) still have major drawbacks that have kept them from being as useful as many would like them to be. Retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, aims to fix some of those drawbacks.

Perhaps the most prominent drawback of LLMs is their tendency toward confabulation (also called “hallucination”), which is a statistical gap-filling phenomenon AI language models produce when they are tasked with reproducing knowledge that wasn’t present in the training data. They generate plausible-sounding text that can veer toward accuracy when the training data is solid but otherwise may just be completely made up.

Relying on confabulating AI models gets people and companies in trouble, as we’ve covered in the past. In 2023, we saw two instances of lawyers citing legal cases, confabulated by AI, that didn’t exist. We’ve covered claims against OpenAI in which ChatGPT confabulated and accused innocent people of doing terrible things. In February, we wrote about Air Canada’s customer service chatbot inventing a refund policy, and in March, a New York City chatbot was caught confabulating city regulations.

Enlarge (credit: gmast3r | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

After the most downloaded local news app in the US, NewsBreak, shared an AI-generated story about a fake New Jersey shooting last Christmas Eve, New Jersey police had to post a statement online to reassure troubled citizens that the story was "entirely false," Reuters reported.

"Nothing even similar to this story occurred on or around Christmas, or even in recent memory for the area they described," the cops' Facebook post said. "It seems this 'news' outlet's AI writes fiction they have no problem publishing to readers."

It took NewsBreak—which attracts over 50 million monthly users—four days to remove the fake shooting story, and it apparently wasn't an isolated incident. According to Reuters, NewsBreak's AI tool, which scrapes the web and helps rewrite local news stories, has been used to publish at least 40 misleading or erroneous stories since 2021.