Judge tosses Justin Baldoni's lawsuit against Blake Lively, New York Times
A federal judge in New York dismissed Justin Baldoni's $400 million defamation lawsuit against Blake Lively on Monday, a significant step in the sprawling legal saga between the two 'It Ends With Us' stars.
Baldoni sued Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, in January, accusing the Hollywood power couple of trying to hurt his career amid the press tour and production of 'It Ends With Us,' an adaptation of Colleen Hoover's best-selling romance novel with the same name. He also sued the New York Times, alleging that the newspaper published an article heavily relying on Lively's account against Baldoni without fact-checking.
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Boston Globe
19 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Disney has filed an AI lawsuit that could shift the future of entertainment
As AI rapidly develops, tech companies have raced to build and monetize tools that generate Hollywood-grade images and videos. Now these tools are poised to transform moviemaking and the entertainment industry in coming years, experts say, and this lawsuit represents a bid by some of Hollywood's giants to secure their place in that future. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'It's sort of a 'finally' moment,' said Chad Hummel, principal at the Los Angeles office of the law firm McKool Smith. Previously, entertainment giants had stayed on the sidelines even as researchers documented how AI tools could be used to generate apparently infringing content. Now they've entered the fray in a big way. Advertisement Midjourney is one of a handful of AI generators that has captured the world's imagination by letting users spin up images on demand. What started as a novelty quickly became a major source of online content, as people used Midjourney and other generators such as OpenAI's Sora and Stable Diffusion to generate everything from memes to pornography to reimaginations of popular characters from movies and TV. Advertisement But the resulting images don't come from a vacuum - the AI models are trained by ingesting millions of words and images from across the internet, including copyrighted work from individual artists and entertainment studios. AI companies claim that their generators are spitting out entirely new creations and that the training data falls under 'fair use' according to copyright law. Artists and midsize media companies have pushed back, saying the AI is stealing their work. Disney and Universal's lawsuit frames the issue as a matter of good versus evil, calling Midjourney 'a bottomless pit of plagiarism.' AI industry advocates counter that legacy media companies are standing in the way of a technological advance that could unleash a wave of creativity. Midjourney did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the companies allege that Midjourney 'seeks to reap the rewards' of Disney's creative work by selling an AI image service that 'functions as a virtual vending machine, generating unauthorized copies of Disney's and Universal's copyrighted works.' Indeed, AI-generated content depicting beloved - and copyrighted - characters such as Mario, Shrek or Winnie the Pooh has circulated online, at times going viral on social media and spawning a new approach to fan art. Star Wars junkies, for instance, no longer have to comb the web for stories and visuals based on their favorite characters - they can use an AI video generator to create an original 11-minute Star Wars movie with photorealistic sets and characters. AI video still isn't advanced enough to produce passable full-length films or TV shows, Washington Post tests found. Advertisement That might be why copyright holders waited to file lawsuits against AI video generators, said James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell University. While AI audio can now produce songs that sound human-generated, AI video hasn't made that leap, he said. OpenAI's Sora, for example, can only generate content roughly a minute long. And although the speed and fluency is a remarkable improvement compared to older models, it doesn't offer the kind of fine-grained controls directors and studios need, according to Grimmelmann. But production companies are already using AI for preproduction brainstorming, special effects and on-screen images. The quality of AI-generated content has improved rapidly since OpenAI first released its image generator DALL-E in 2021, with companies including OpenAI and Google now offering video generators to the public. Many believe it's a matter of time before content that's entirely AI generated makes its way into mainstream entertainment. SAG-AFTRA, the union representing film and TV actors, has struck deals with voice AI companies allowing actors to license their voices, and this week the union reached a tentative agreement with a collection of video game companies to pay actors if their voices or likenesses appear in AI-generated games. 'Patience and persistence has resulted in a deal that puts in place the necessary A.I. guardrails that defend performers' livelihoods in the A.I. age,' the union said in a blog post Monday. Meanwhile, a new class of AI start-ups such as Moonvalley and Runway are already working with Hollywood studios to integrate AI into the production process, the companies have said. This lawsuit is the latest in a barrage by rightsholders - including artists, authors and media companies - alleging infringement by AI firms. Among the highest-profile cases is one filed by the New York Times against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. At the same time, many are signing multimillion-dollar licensing deals with AI firms granting them full access to their content - for a price. (The Washington Post has a content-sharing deal with OpenAI.) Advertisement The Disney and Universal suit takes a different tack from other lawsuits, demanding that Midjourney filter what it generates rather than avoid scraping the studios' intellectual property altogether. 'This one seems more aimed at establishing the kind of expectations that copyright owners have of non-AI platforms: You need to take down obvious copies of our works,' said Grimmelmann. What the movie studios don't want, according to Hummel, is for tech firms to be able to cut them out of the equation by training models on their work without having to pay for it. 'This is not going to be Hollywood trying to shut down generative AI,' Hummel said. 'It's about compensation.' Already, many visual artists are feeling the effects of AI's entry, said Jon Lam, a video game artist and creators rights activist. He said he has watched his circle of professional contacts struggle to find work when AI can replicate different art styles with the click of a mouse. Wednesday's lawsuit was 'a huge confidence boost' for creatives like Lam hoping for an upset that stops film, TV and video game studios from drawing on artists' work without paying them, he said. A win for Disney and Universal wouldn't necessarily protect artists in the entertainment industry from getting replaced by AI, said Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at University of Chicago who helped build Glaze, a software tool that protects visual art from AI mimicry. But it could drastically limit the material that AI tools can draw from, he said. Without fresh data, AI generators would regurgitate the same visual ideas over and over, Zhao said, making them less useful for production companies. In that sense, both AI companies and entertainment studios rely on artists who produce new work and make a living wage. Advertisement Some tech industry leaders have argued that creating tools such as ChatGPT would be impossible if they couldn't be trained on copyrighted data - and that requiring AI companies to pay every creator would stall an AI boom that promises vast economic benefits. Studios such as Disney and Universal should embrace AI video rather than suing to stop it, said Adam Eisgrau, who leads a program on AI, creativity and copyright for the Chamber of Progress, a center-left trade group that represents technology companies including Midjourney. 'My initial reaction is that the movie industry has a long history and a short memory,' Eisgrau said. He compared the lawsuit to one decades ago in which studios sued the makers of videocassette players and lost - which he said was 'lucky for them,' because they ended up profiting greatly from the technology. Meanwhile, each step forward for AI video is met with rapt attention from fans of the tech. A clip posted Sunday in the Reddit forum r/aivideo showed a short trailer for a nonexistent movie - one with visual references starkly similar to science fiction series such as Star Wars. 'Please turn this into a feature film. It would be freaking crazy,' one commenter said. 'That's the plan!' replied the poster. Advertisement - - - Nitasha Tiku contributed to this report.
Fox News
40 minutes ago
- Fox News
Rogan claims 2 former presidents called Spotify over his controversial COVID commentary
Podcaster Joe Rogan claimed Tuesday that two unnamed former presidents were involved in the protest against his skeptical discussions about COVID-19. Spotify received backlash in 2022 for allowing Rogan, one of its biggest stars, to spread what progressive critics claimed was COVID misinformation. Musician Neil Young famously removed his content from Spotify in protest over Rogan's rhetoric, saying he no longer wanted to share a platform with him. "And then all of a sudden, I hear that Neil Young wants me removed from Spotify. I was like, 'What the f--- is going on? This is crazy,'" Rogan said Tuesday. "Spotify got calls from two former presidents," he added. Then-Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki commented on the controversy directly. After Spotify announced it would flag podcasts that cover COVID-19, Psaki responded, "So this disclaimer, it's a positive step, but we want every platform to continue doing more to call out misinformation while also uplifting accurate information." "Our hope is that all major tech platforms — and all major news sources for that matter — be responsible and be vigilant to ensure the American people have access to accurate information on something as significant as COVID-19," she added. But Rogan said that instead of being censored or deplatformed, "I grew by 2 million subscribers in a month." "People started listening," he said, despite how his critics attacked his reputation. "And they started listening, like, 'Oh, he's really reasonable and pretty humble about all this stuff and just asking questions.'" Rogan also condemned how media outlets attacked his use of Ivermectin to treat his COVID-19 by referring to it as a horse dewormer. "I'm, like, 'Why aren't you guys concentrating on the fact that a 55-year-old man is fine three days later during the worst strain?' It was during the Delta where everybody's freaking out. 'This one's going to kill us all.' And I was fine in three days," he said. Rogan described the whole experience as a "wake-up call" that opened his eyes about the liberal legacy media. "It's so dirty. It's such a dirty business," Rogan said. "God, I used to have massive respect for journalists. If I had never done this podcast, I would be your regular schmo out there with, you know, just spitting out all the company lines and all the blast all over the news." "I kind of liked it better then," he said with a laugh. "I didn't think the world is filled with demons, money-hungry demons that are willing to sacrifice human lives in the pursuit of revenue." Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek addressed the pushback against hosting Rogan during the company's earnings call in February 2022. "I think the important part here is that we don't change our policies based on one creator, nor do we change it based on any media cycle," the chief executive said at the time. "Our policies have been carefully written with the input from numbers of internal and external experts in this space – and I do believe they're right for our platform." Fox News Digital reached out to Spotify for comment and did not receive an immediate reply.
New York Times
41 minutes ago
- New York Times
How the Beach Boys' ‘Pet Sounds' Entered the Pop Music Pantheon. (Eventually.)
Making a list of the best rock albums ever is easy: Something old (the Beatles), something new or newer (perhaps Radiohead), something borrowed (the Rolling Stones' blues or disco pastiches) and Joni Mitchell's 'Blue.' And, of course, bursting into the top 10 — and often higher — of any respectable list: 'Pet Sounds.' The overwhelming brainchild of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' chief songwriter whose death at 82 was announced on Wednesday, 'Pet Sounds' is beautiful — with gorgeous vocal harmonies, haunting timbres and wistful lyrics of adolescent longing and estrangement. It was a landmark in studio experimentation that changed the idea of how albums could be made. But one thing that stands out about the Beach Boys' masterpiece is how gradually it came to be widely celebrated, compared with many of its peers. 'When it was released in the United States,' said Jan Butler, a senior lecturer in popular music at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, 'it did pretty well, but for the Beach Boys, it was considered a flop.' Released in the spring of 1966, 'Pet Sounds' represented a break from the catchy tunes about surfing, cars and girls that the group had consistently rode to the top of the charts. The opening track is called 'Wouldn't It Be Nice,' but previous Beach Boys songs had described how nice it was. The album peaked at No. 10 — low for one of the most popular acts at the time — and was the first Beach Boys album in three years not to reach gold status, Butler wrote in a chapter of an academic book. The Beach Boys' record company, Capitol, rushed out a greatest-hits that outsold the album of original music. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
