Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that today is powering social networking software like Twitter alternative Mastodon, the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. The news was revealed in response to a Twitter user’s complaint about Mastodon’s complexities. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg — whose company acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019 — suggested the user “come to Tumblr” as the site would soon “add activitypub for interconnect.”
DeviantArt’s new protection will rely on an HTML tag to prohibit the software robots that crawl pages for images from downloading those images for training sets. Artists who specify that their content can’t be used for AI system development will have “noai” and “noimageai” directives appended to the HTML page associated with their art. In order to remain in compliance with DeviantArt’s updated terms of service, third parties using DeviantArt-sourced content for AI training will have to ensure that their data sets exclude content that has the tags present, Levy says.
It’s worth noting that in the intervening weeks since Unity and ironSource first announced their plans, AppLovin entered the conversation in a big way when it tabled a $20 billion offer for Unity, on the condition that Unity ended plans to merge with AppLovin’s rival, ironSource. After consideration, Unity ultimately rejected that offer, with its board noting that AppLovin’s offer wasn’t a “superior proposal.”
There’s no doubt this rapid growth in Mastodon app downloads is directly tied to the Musk Twitter takeover. However, Mastodon’s growth isn’t the only sign that some Twitter users are abandoning the platform.
“Today’s announcement comes as the streaming giant suffers from a loss of nearly one million subscribers and looks for ways to earn more revenue. Last week, Netflix launched its cheaper ad-supported tier.”
“Assuming Dance Diffusion one day reaches the point where it can generate coherent whole songs, it seems inevitable that major ethical and legal issues will come to the fore. They already have, albeit around simpler AI systems. In 2020, Jay-Z ‘s record label filed copyright strikes against a YouTube channel, Vocal Synthesis, for using AI to create Jay-Z covers of songs like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” After initially removing the videos, YouTube reinstated them, finding the takedown requests were “incomplete.” But deepfaked music still stands on murky legal ground.”
“Today’s announcement of the acquisition of Kinzen is an indication that even that step was not enough — Spotify needed to bring content moderation expertise in-house, it seems.
In short, Kinzen’s solutions are aimed at helping platforms more quickly respond to content moderation issues in real time by using a combination of technology and human expertise at scale.”
