Universal Music Group (UMG), the label representing artists such as Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande, says that it’ll pull its music from TikTok tomorrow at midnight after failing to reach a deal with the platform’s parent company, ByteDance, over royalties.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/30/universal-music-group-plans-to-pull-song-catalog-from-tiktok/
It’s all over for Adobe XD. After losing out in its $20bn bid for Figma, the firm is conceding defeat in the UI design arena – for now, at least. In the fallout of a deal that saw the company placed under the microscope of competition authorities in Europe and the US, Bloomberg is reporting that Adobe has confirmed it has “no plans to further invest” in its own UI/UX web design software.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/adobe-throws-xd-overboard-after-losing-out-on-dollar20bn-figma-deal
“Designed for experimentation and creativity, ImageFX lets you create images with a simple text prompt, then easily modify them with a new take on prompting using expressive chips,” Google writes in a blog post. “We invested in the safety of training data from the outset,” Google said. “Consistent with our AI principles, we also conducted extensive adversarial testing and red teaming to identify and mitigate potential harmful and problematic content.”
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/01/google-launches-an-ai-powered-image-generator/
Nightshade, a project from the University of Chicago, gives artists some recourse by “poisoning” image data, rendering it useless or disruptive to AI model training. Ben Zhao, a computer science professor who led the project, compared Nightshade to “putting hot sauce in your lunch so it doesn’t get stolen from the workplace fridge.”
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/26/nightshade-the-tool-that-poisons-data-gives-artists-a-fighting-chance-against-ai/
“The new orb is coming and the next iterations will look quite different,” Blania said during a fireside chat at a StrictlyVC event on Wednesday. He noted that he joined the company about four years ago and the Orb’s initial design predated his career at the company. Over the past seven days, more than 190,000 new accounts were created and about 3.13 million people total have signed up for Worldcoin, according to its website. “The thesis is very simple. We race toward billions of users as fast as we possibly can,” Blania said.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/24/worldcoin-to-launch-new-orb-to-make-its-eyeball-scanning-device-look-more-friendly/
BeReal, a rising social media app that emphasizes authenticity, is making its first outreach to brands and celebrities. Starting February 6, brands and celebrities will be able to sign up as “RealBrands” or “RealPeople,” and fans can watch them share behind the scenes moments from their lives that they might not share elsewhere.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/24/bereal-which-now-has-23m-daus-is-onboarding-brands-and-celebs/
Palworld is a new video game where players can capture knockoff Pokémon and put them to work in a factory manufacturing AR-15s. It sold 5 million copies in 3 days. Die hard Pokémon fans are angry online because they see Palworld as a cheap asset flip and they believe, without evidence, that Pocketpair used AI to create it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3m5nw/palworld-pokemon-game-ai-controversy