In less than three years, generative AI has evolved from an experimental toy to a regular presence in studio pitches, previs workflows, and even the festival circuit. Yet one challenge has stymied the full adoption of generative AI in long-form storytelling: establishing and maintaining control over outputs. This challenge also fuels many of the anxieties surrounding the use of artificial intelligence in media production. How can artists maintain their creative voice when a machine is doing all the artistic work, and often doing so with inconsistent results? The Entertainment Technology Center at USC set out to tackle these and related challenges with a new film project, “The Bends.” Continue reading Consistency Is Key: Lessons on Generative AI via ‘The Bends’

Microsoft is in the final phases of building the $3.3 billion Wisconsin facility it says will be the most powerful AI data center in the world when it comes online in early 2026 to train the next decade of artificial intelligence models. The software giant has already begun staffing the operation and is already planning further expansion, with another $4 billion to be spent in the next three years to build a second data center of similar size and scale — bringing the total investment in Wisconsin to more than $7 billion. Located in Mount Pleasant, the nearly completed facility will be the first in what Microsoft is calling its Fairwater family of hyperscale data centers. Continue reading Microsoft Details $7 Billion Future of Wisconsin AI Data Center

Publishers have been weathering a monetization crisis as AI encroaches on their original content. Automated licensing has become something of a lifeline. Really Simple Licensing (RSL) is an open, decentralized protocol from nonprofit rights organization RSL Collective, which is making it available free to websites that can use it to set licensing, usage and compensation terms for AI crawlers and agents. Based on the scalable Really Simple Syndication (RSS) framework, it works for digital content from web pages to books and videos, helping to thwart unauthorized scraping. Reddit, People, Yahoo and Ziff Davis are among those who have signed up. Continue reading RSL Offers Publishers a Path to Compensation for AI Scraping

OpenAI is said to be in talks with Broadcom about developing custom AI inference chips to run its models. On an earnings call last week, Broadcom disclosed that an AI developer had placed a $10 billion order for AI server racks using its chips. That new customer was reported to be OpenAI, which has relied primarily on hotly sought-after Nvidia GPUs for model training and deployment. Broadcom specializes in XPUs — accelerator chips designed for specific uses, like inference for ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly complained that a shortage of chips has impeded the company’s ability to get new models and products to market. Continue reading OpenAI Reportedly Turning to Broadcom for Custom AI Chips

OpenAI is sending the message that artificial intelligence is coming to make jobs, not take jobs. The company is developing the OpenAI Jobs Platform and a complementary OpenAI Certification program, and says it will certify 10 million Americans by 2030 working with launch partners including Walmart. The move comes as OpenAI is amping up its commercial endeavors. Although observers are positioning the career-focused effort as a potential rival to LinkedIn, owned by OpenAI investor Microsoft, the new contender will have a much narrower focus. It is expected to go live in mid-2026. Continue reading OpenAI Developing a Job Platform and Certification Program

Meta Platform reported another strong quarter, with profit up 36 percent to $18 billion on revenue of $47.5 billion, a 22 percent increase. Justifying to investors why the company spent billions restructuring AI operations as part of the new AI Superintelligence Lab and recruiting talent to run it, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized his desire “to build personal superintelligence for everyone in the world.” Zuckerberg said he believes AI superintelligence “has the potential to begin an exciting new era of individual empowerment.” Meta plans to more than double spending to build AI infrastructure, including server-filled data centers, and initiatives supporting model training and cloud computing. Continue reading Meta Profit Is Up 36 Percent, Fueling Superintelligence Race

The European Union has published a General Purpose AI (GPAI) Code of Practice designed to help companies comply with the AI Act, which includes copyright protections and transparency requirements for advanced models. The Code of Practice bans training models on unauthorized materials and says companies must comply with copyright-holder requests to omit work from datasets. Developers are required to provide documentation describing the features of their AI models. The AI Act began taking effect in August 2024 and is being implemented gradually, with key transparency, governance and privacy provisions coming into force next month. Continue reading EU Releases AI Practices Code to Help with Legal Compliance

Moonvalley, the AI startup behind Marey, a high-quality video generator trained exclusively on licensed content, has just put the product in general release. The credits-based subscription pricing ranges from $15 to $150 per month. In addition to ethical training on 1080p native video, Marey also takes a non-traditional approach on its user interface, eschewing prompts for what it says is a more creatively intuitive process. “Directors need precise control over every creative decision, plus legal confidence for commercial use. Today we’re delivering both,” says Moonvalley CEO and co-founder Naeem Talukdar. Continue reading Moonvalley’s Production-Tailored AI Marey Publicly Released

AI startup Runway has a new tool called Game Worlds that lets users generate simple video game worlds using images and text-based prompts. At the moment, Runway Game Worlds can only help generate simple text-based interactive adventures that include pictures, but the company has plans to enable more complex game creation by the end of the year. Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela says the company is interested in partnering with video game companies who are willing to provide game data that can be used to train the company’s models in exchange for generative capabilities. Continue reading Runway AI Intros Game Worlds Generator in Limited Preview

Cloudflare, which spent the past year introducing tools to help content providers prevent unwanted AI scraping, is launching a marketplace that lets websites charge for the privilege of using a “pay-per-crawl” model. The Internet infrastructure and security company says it is the first to enable blocking AI crawlers by default, providing access only with permission and, if wanted, compensation. As of July 1, AI companies can use Cloudflare’s marketplace to “clearly state their purpose — if their crawlers are used for training, inference, or search — to help website owners decide which crawlers to allow.” Continue reading Cloudflare Pay-per-Crawl Lets Publishers Monetize Scrapes

Creative Commons, the non-profit that pioneered sharing content through permissive licensing, is launching CC Signals, a framework to signal permissions for content use by machines in the age of artificial intelligence. “They are both a technical and legal tool and a social proposition: a call for a new pact between those who share data and those who use it to train AI models,” says Creative Commons CEO Anna Tumadóttir, noting the signals are “based on a set of limited but meaningful options shaped in the public interest.” The framework is designed to bridge the openness of the Internet with AI’s insatiable demand for training data, according to Creative Commons. Continue reading Creative Commons Introduces New Licensing Platform for AI

Two weeks after its global rebranding of GroupM to WPP Media, the bespoke London-based marketing behemoth is launching Open Intelligence, an “AI identity solution” that WPP says will better target viewers with privacy-conscious solutions that more effectively message on behalf of its clients. Built around what WPP calls “the industry’s first Large Marketing Model,” Open Intelligence is “trained on the world’s largest and most diverse set of audience, behavioral, and event data,” culled from WPP’s decentralized partnership network. “Our model learns continuously from trillions of signals across more than 350 partners in over 75 markets,” the company claims. Continue reading WPP Media Launches Industry’s First Large Marketing Model

Google DeepMind has introduced AlphaEvolve, a coding agent that takes an evolutionary approach to general-purpose algorithm discovery and model optimization. AlphaEvolve combines the creative problem-solving abilities of Google’s Gemini models with automated evaluators that verify answers, then applies an evolutionary framework that improves on the most promising results. Evolutionary AI refers to techniques inspired by biological evolution, including natural selection, to optimize and design machine learning models. Continue reading Google DeepMind AlphaEvolve: Model of Algorithm Efficiency

Adobe has released its free Content Authenticity web app in beta. The app is designed to help protect creators’ work and allows them to embed a request that generative AI models don’t use their work for training. Users can apply tags for up to 50 images at once. In addition to applying tags, users can customize and inspect Adobe Content Credentials using the the Adobe Content Authenticity browser extension for Google Chrome. The information is invisible until the inspection tool is opened and can include links to a creator’s social media account, website or other identifying attributes. Continue reading Adobe Launches Its Content Authenticity App in Public Beta

Instagram is using AI to find teens who have falsified their age and is reclassifying them into “Teen Accounts” settings. The Meta social platform is reaching out to parents to tell them about “the importance of their teens providing the correct ages online, and tips to check and confirm their teens’ ages together,” but letting them know they “don’t have to go it alone — we’re using AI to help.” Instagram launched Teen Accounts last year as a way to enroll users and provide built-in protections. Those under 16 need a parent or guardian’s permission to change the setting. The safeguards are on by default for young users, limiting who can make contact and filtering viewable content. Continue reading Instagram Taps AI to Identify Young Users for Teen Accounts