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AI COMPANIES HAVE BEEN ACCUSED OF PLAGIARISM AND THEFT
In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover the big row simmering between AI and legacy media companies. Big fish like Forbes and Wired have effectively accused Perplexity of theft, bypassing rules to train its AI search and answer engine on their articles. Amazon has also weighed in to investigate, but this feels like the start of a bigger argument that could have wide-reaching impacts on how AI is trained and who gets paid in the process. We also have news on the hot new app noplace, accusations of AI candidates at an election, Apple and Epic (sort of) burying the hatchet, and we wish Amazon a happy birthday. Our Stat covers Threads’ big milestone, whereas our web3 section wonders whether Grand Theft Auto VI will take the plunge into crypto.
⛔🤖 AI – Amazon Investigating Perplexity Over Web Scraping and Plagiarism
There’s a big row rumbling between AI companies and the wider media this week, which could have huge implications for how AI models are trained. In the firing line is Perplexity, the AI-powered ‘answer engine’. On the complainant side are Wired and Forbes, both of whom have accused Perplexity of stealing their articles, saying Perplexity’s output is tantamount to plagiarism. Amazon’s AWS hosts Perplexity, and scraping websites for data without permission violates its rules. Perplexity has been accused of ignoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a long-standing web standard that indicates that a website is off-limits for bots. In related news, Figma has had to temporarily shelve its AI Make Design software, as its designs seem to be ripping off other apps, including Apple’s Weather app. With some fortuitous timing, web hosting provider Cloudflare has announced a one-click AI bot blocker this week, allowing users to block all bots from their content. Yet, this is a big challenge for generative AI companies. Deals can be made (see Reddit and OpenAI🤝) that suit both parties, but much of the legacy media sees data scraping without permission as theft (see New York Times vs. OpenAI🥊). This is just the beginning of a bigger fight. #StoppingBots Read more here.
This week we review the 'appenings of Q2. Kate and Paul sat down to revisit moments from this past quarter, talking about our rebrand, our birthday, and much more. Catch the full video on YouTube and be on the lookout for our special edition newsletter with all the deets coming out this week.
This week’s GPT is FaceGPT. Manny Movahedi and his team have made some noise with this creation. On our most recent podcast episode, Paul sits down with Manny to learn more about this revolutionary tech and just how it’s making a difference. Be sure to check out the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Amazon 🙂
📈📉 Threads – Meta’s Twitter Rival Hits Milestone After One Year in Business
Meta’s Threads celebrated its one-year anniversary by hitting a milestone of 175 million monthly active users, about half the number of the platform it was created to supplant, Twitter/X. That said, there are signs that Threads is carving out its own identity, building, for example, a community of photographers and artists to support the idea that Zuck has created more than a Twitter clone. #NewThreads Read more here.
🎂 Amazon at 30. From books being sold by Jeff Bezos in his garage in 1994 to arguably the world’s only ‘Everything Company’ in 2024, Happy Birthday, Amazon. Thanks for all the needless buys over the years. Report here.
🧑⚖️ Gen Z Sends ‘noplace’ to 1st Place. The hottest social media app around is noplace, a kind of Twitter-MySpace hybrid aimed at Gen Z. It just hit No.1 on the App Store. More here.
❎ The First AI election? The UK General Election has wrapped up, but some losing candidates from the Reform Party are being accused of being AI-generated. Roll on November, eh? Story here.
🍏 Apple Relents on Epic Games Store Frenemies Apple and Epic have buried the hatchet (for now), with the latter opening a third-party iOS games store in the EU. Details here.
🪙 🎮 Game-FI – Reports Suggest GTA VI Could Have Crypto Payments
For several years we have been told that Game-Fi (video gaming that incorporates blockchain and crypto) is going to be the next Big Thing. It still hasn’t, arguably because nobody has made a crypto-based game that isn’t want-to-poke-your-eyes-out boring. But what about the reverse route, i.e., injecting web3 into an already popular game? The big rumor right now is that the daddy of them all – Grand Theft Auto – may allow Bitcoin and Ethereum for in-game purchases, as well as a crypto reward system, for the upcoming GTA VI. If the leaks are true, this would be a massive coup for the web3 sector. #GTACrypto Read more here.
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