Brooks Barnes, The New York Times; Disney Agrees to Bring Its Characters to OpenAI’s Sora Videos
"In a watershed moment for Hollywood and generative artificial intelligence, Disney on Thursday announced an agreement to bring its characters to Sora, OpenAI’s short-form video platform. Videos made with Sora will be available to stream on Disney+ as part of the three-year deal...
“The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling,” Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of Disney, said in a statement.
Disney is the first major Hollywood company to cross this particular Rubicon."
Agence France-Presse via The Guardian; "Ruined my Christmas spirit’: McDonald’s removes AI-generated ad after backlash
"Melanie Bridge, the chief executive of the Sweetshop Films, the company which made the ad, defended its use of AI in a post on LinkedIn.
“It’s never about replacing craft, it’s about expanding the toolbox. The vision, the taste, the leadership … that will always be human,” she said.
“And here’s the part people don’t see: the hours that went into this job far exceeded a traditional shoot. Ten people, five weeks, full-time.”
But that too sparked online debate.
Emlyn Davies, from the independent production company Bomper Studio, replied to the LinkedIn post: “What about the humans who would have been in it, the actors, the choir?
“Ten people on a project like this is a tiny amount compared to shooting it traditionally live action.”
Coca-Cola recently released its own AI-generated holiday ad, despite receiving backlash when it did the same last year.
The company’s new offering avoids close-ups of humans and mostly features AI-generated images of cute animals in a wintry setting."
Liv McMahon , BBC; EU investigates Google over AI-generated summaries in search results
"The Commission's investigation comes down to whether Google has used the work of other people published online to build its own AI tools which it can profit from."
Rebecca Bellan , TechCrunch; The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement
"The New York Times filed suit Friday against AI search startup Perplexity for copyright infringement, its second lawsuit against an AI company. The Times joins several media outlets suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week."
Blake Brittain, Reuters ; OpenAI loses fight to keep ChatGPT logs secret in copyright case
"OpenAI must produce millions of anonymized chat logs from ChatGPT users in its high-stakes copyright dispute with the New York Times and other news outlets, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang in a decision made public on Wednesday said that the 20 million logs were relevant to the outlets' claims and that handing them over would not risk violating users' privacy."
KLAUDIA JAŹWIŃSKA, Columbia Journalism Review; Lawsuit or License?
"Today, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism is releasing a tracker that monitors developments between news publishers and AI companies—including lawsuits, deals, and grants—based on publicly available information."
Robert Booth , The Guardian; ‘The biggest decision yet’
"Humanity will have to decide by 2030 whether to take the “ultimate risk” of letting artificial intelligence systems train themselves to become more powerful, one of the world’s leading AI scientists has said.
Jared Kaplan, the chief scientist and co-owner of the $180bn (£135bn) US startup Anthropic, said a choice was looming about how much autonomy the systems should be given to evolve.
The move could trigger a beneficial “intelligence explosion” – or be the moment humans end up losing control...
He is not alone at Anthropic in voicing concerns. One of his co-founders, Jack Clark, said in October he was both an optimist and “deeply afraid” about the trajectory of AI, which he called “a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine”.
Kaplan said he was very optimistic about the alignment of AI systems with the interests of humanity up to the level of human intelligence, but was concerned about the consequences if and when they exceed that threshold."
Natasha Singer, The New York Times; College Students Flock to a New Major: A.I.
"Artificial intelligence is the hot new college major...
Now interest in understanding, using and learning how to build A.I. technologies is soaring, and schools are racing to meet rising student and industry demand.
Over the last two years, dozens of U.S. universities and colleges have announced new A.I. departments, majors, minors, courses, interdisciplinary concentrations and other programs.
In 2022, for instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a major called “A.I. and decision-making.” Students in the program learn to develop A.I. systems and study how technologies like robots interact with humans and the environment. This year, nearly 330 students are enrolled in the program — making A.I. the second-largest major at M.I.T. after computer science.
“Students who prefer to work with data to address problems find themselves more drawn to an A.I. major,” said Asu Ozdaglar, the deputy dean of academics at the M.I.T. Schwarzman College of Computing. Students interested in applying A.I. in fields like biology and health care are also flocking to the new major, she added."
Devon Dekuyper , Calgary Herald; 'Technology isn't neutral': Calgary bishop raises ethical questions around AI
"We, as human beings, use technology, and we also have to be able to understand it, but also to apply it such that it does not impact negatively the human person, their flourishing (or) society,' said Bishop McGrattan"
If you set aside the more apocalyptic scenarios and assume that AI will continue to advance – perhaps at a slower pace than in the recent past – it’s quite possible that thoughtful, original, human-generated writing will become even more valuable.
Put another way: The work of writers, journalists and intellectuals will not become superfluous simply because much of the web is no longer written by humans."
Intellectual property (IP) rights and IP-related rights, such as trade secrets and regulatory exclusivities, play a crucial role in the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. However, possible interactions may be anticipated when comparing the legal relationships formed by these rights with those established by human rights. This study synthesises 53 laws and treaties illustrating the IP landscape for AI in health systems across Europe and examines their intersections with health-focused human rights. Our analysis reveals that a great variety of datasets, software, hardware, output, AI model architecture, data bases, and graphical user interfaces can be subject to IP protection. Although codified limitations and exceptions on IP and IP-related rights exist, interpretation of their conditions and scope permits for diverse interpretations and is left to the discretion of courts. Comparing these rights to health-focused human rights highlights tensions between promoting innovation and ensuring accessibility, quality, and equity in health systems, as well as between human rights ideals and the protection of European digital sovereignty. As these rights often pursue conflicting objectives and may involve trade-offs, future research should explore new ways to reconcile these objectives and foster solidarity in sharing the risks and benefits among stakeholders."
Gabe Castro-Root, The New York Times ; What Is Agentic A.I., and Would You Trust It to Book a Flight?
"A bot may soon be booking your vacation.
Millions of travelers already use artificial intelligence to compare options for flights, hotels, rental cars and more. About 30 percent of U.S. travelers say they’re comfortable using A.I. to plan a trip. But these tools are about to take a big step.
Agentic A.I., a rapidly emerging type of artificial intelligence, will be able to find and pay for reservations with limited human involvement, developers say. Companies like Expedia, Google, Kayak and Priceline are experimenting with or rolling out agentic A.I. tools.
Travelers using agentic A.I. would set parameters like dates and a price range for their travel plans, then hand over their credit card information to the bot, which would monitor prices and book on their behalf...
Think of agentic A.I. as a personal assistant, said Shilpa Ranganathan, the chief product officer at Expedia Group, which is developing both generative and agentic A.I. trip-planning tools.
While the more familiar generative A.I. can summarize information and answer questions, agentic tools can carry out tasks. Travelers benefit by deputizing these tools to perform time-consuming chores like tracking flight prices."
Reza Torkzadeh, Daily Journal; AI, ethics, and the lawyer's duty after Noland v. Land of the Free
"Noland establishes a bright line for California lawyers. AI may assist with drafting or research, but it does not replace judgment, verification or ethical responsibility. Technology may change how legal work is produced -- it does not change who is accountable for it."
The Florida Bar; GEORGE C. YOUNG AMERICAN INNS OF COURT EXPLORES ETHICS AND PITFALLS OF AI IN THE COURTROOM
"The George C. Young American Inns of Court continued its ongoing focus on artificial intelligence with a recent program titled, “The Use of AI to Craft Openings, Closings, and Directing Cross-Examination: Ethical Imperatives and Practical Realities.”...
Demonstrations showed that many members could not distinguish AI-generated narratives from those written by humans, highlighting the technology’s increasingly high-quality output. However, presenters also noted recurring drawbacks. AI-generated direct and cross-examinations frequently included prohibited or incorrect elements such as hearsay, compound questioning, and fabricated details — jokingly referred to as “ghost people” — distinguishing factual hallucinations from the better-known “phantom citation” problem.
The program concluded with a reminder that while AI may streamline drafting and help lawyers think creatively, professional judgment cannot be outsourced. The ultimate responsibility for accuracy, ethics, and advocacy remains with the lawyer."
"A federal judge declined to dismiss a copyright-infringement claim in a proposed class action led by Mike Huckabee, accusing Bloomberg LP of using a pirated dataset to train its AI model.
Judge Margaret M. Garnett said she couldn’t evaluate Bloomberg’s defense that its use of authors’ books to train BloombergGPT was fair use under US copyright law without a factual record, denying its motion to dismiss in a Monday opinion filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York."
Robert Booth, The Guardian; Minister indicates sympathy for artists in debate over AI and copyright
"The technology secretary, Liz Kendall, has indicated she is sympathetic to artists’ demands not to have their copyrighted works scraped by AI companies without payment and said she wanted to “reset” the debate.
In remarks that suggest a change in approach from her predecessor, Peter Kyle, who had hoped to require artists to actively opt out of having their work ingested by generative AI systems, she said “people rightly want to get paid for the work that they do” and “we have to find a way that both sectors can grow and thrive in future”.
The government has been consulting on a new intellectual property framework for AI which, in the case of the most common large language models (LLMs), requires vast amounts of training data to work effectively.
The issue has sparked impassioned protests from some of Britain’s most famous artists. This month Paul McCartney released a silent two-minute 45 second track of an empty studio on an album protesting against copyright grabs by AI firms as part of a campaign also backed by Kate Bush, Sam Fender, the Pet Shop Boys and Hans Zimmer."
, The Daily Beast; Trump Hatches Creepy New Plot to Target ‘Suspicious’ Drivers
"Border Patrol agents armed with hidden cameras and AI-driven algorithms are flagging millions of American drivers as “suspicious” and triggering covert traffic stops across the country, according to a new investigation.
The Trump administration has quietly expanded a vast domestic surveillance web that tracks and analyzes the travel patterns of millions of drivers—feeding local police tips that lead to secretive traffic stops, searches, and arrests, the Associated Press reports.
The intelligence project, built and run by Border Patrol’s parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) gathers vehicle movements through a national network of covert license plate readers disguised inside roadside barrels, cones, and job-site equipment, AP reports...
Legal scholars warn that the scale of the data collection—tracking “patterns of life” for millions of ordinary drivers—could violate the Fourth Amendment. “Large-scale surveillance technology that’s capturing everyone and everywhere at every time” may be unconstitutional, Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University, told AP.
The program is powered by an enormous expansion of CBP’s intelligence capabilities since President Donald Trump returned to office. Congress has authorized more than $2.7 billion to layer artificial intelligence onto existing surveillance networks.
Meanwhile, Operation Stonegarden—a two-decade-old federal grant scheme—now channels hundreds of millions of dollars to local sheriff’s offices to buy license-plate readers and drones, and to fund overtime that effectively deputizes local cops into Border Patrol’s mission. Under Trump, congressional Republicans increased Stonegarden to $450 million over four fiscal years."
Alissa Wilkinson , The New York Times; Can You Believe the Documentary You’re Watching?
"Like a surging viral outbreak, A.I.-generated video has suddenly become inescapable. It’s infiltrated our social feeds and wormed its way into political discourse. But documentarians have been bracing for impact since before most of us even knew what the technology could do.
Documentaries fundamentally traffic in issues of truth, transparency and trust. If they use so-called synthetic materials but present them as if they’re “real,” it’s not just a betrayal of the tacit contract between filmmaker and audience. The implications are far broader, and far more serious: a century of shared history is in jeopardy.
At a time when the idea of facts and shared reality is assaulted from every side, the turning point has arrived. The stakes couldn’t be higher. And we all need to pay attention."
, CNN; Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved
"The Wayback Machine, a tool used by millions every day, has proven critical for academics and journalists searching for historical information on what corporations, people and governments have published online in the past, long after their websites have been updated or changed.
For many, the Wayback Machine is like a living history of the internet, and it just logged its trillionth page last month.
Archiving the web is more important and more challenging than ever before. The White House in January ordered vast amounts of government webpages to be taken down. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is blurring the line between what’s real and what’s artificially generated — in some ways replacing the need to visit websites entirely. And more of the internet is now hidden behind paywalls or tucked in conversations with AI chatbots.
It’s the Internet Archive’s job to figure out how to preserve it all."
