Sunday, June 30, 2024

AI versus publishers

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By Anthony Ha

Sunday, June 30, 2024

Image Credits: Getty Images / anuwat meereewee

AI companies and publishers still have a … complicated relationship.

The biggest (recent) target for the media industry's ire has been AI startup Perplexity. The company appeared to copy chunks of a Forbes article without attribution, while Amazon Web Services is reportedly investigating the company after Wired accused it of scraping publishers' content without permission.

Meanwhile, Reddit seems to be taking steps to guard against AI companies' scrapers. A Quora-owned chatbot appears to be circumventing publishers' paywalls. And outside the news business, the record industry is suing AI-powered music generation startups.

That doesn't mean these publishers are opposed to using AI or selling their content to AI companies. (Reddit, for example, has announced deals with Google and OpenAI.) But at the very least, they'd like to get credited and paid. Getting non-hallucinated links would be nice, too.

Keep reading to see what else TechCrunch has been covering this weekend.

Weekend news and opinion

Image Credits: Plaid

Plaid grows to more than 1,000 enterprise customers: Mary Ann Azevedo spoke to executives at fintech services company Plaid about how its expanding product suite has opened the door to enterprise growth. The company says it plans to go public, but it hasn't revealed a timeline. Read more

Legacy software companies are getting a cloud + AI bump: The AI hype isn't just benefiting new startups, but also legacy companies like SAP, Oracle, and IBM. Paul Sawers looks at how each company (and their respective market valuations) has responded to the latest trends. Read more

The year's biggest data breaches: Just in case you were starting to get comfortable, Zack Whittaker reminds us of 2024's biggest breaches, from AT&T to Ticketmaster. Read more

Sarah Bitamazire on responsible AI: Dominic-Madori Davis continues our Women in AI Q&A series by talking to the chief policy officer at boutique advisory firm Lumiera about some of the pressing issues facing the industry, such as AI hardware and geopolitics. Read more

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What else we're reading

Image Credits: Getty Images / PM Images

Netflix's video game strategy still feels like a footnote, but maybe not for long. The Washington Post spoke to the company's vice president of external games, who said Netflix has been learning a lot about what kinds of games its members want. Read more

Also, Platformer explains a recent Supreme Court decision that once again allows government agencies to share their knowledge with social media platforms (a practice known as "jawboning"). Read more