Latest news with #RachelMetz
Boston Globe
02-06-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Record labels in talks to license music to AI firms Udio, Suno
The major music companies sued Udio and Suno last year accusing them of copyright infringement. The Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group for record labels, sought as much as $150,000 per work infringed, which could total billions of dollars. Advertisement The music companies and the AI startups are talking to see if they can agree on terms rather than continue to fight in court. The negotiations are happening in parallel, creating a race of sorts to see which AI company and label will strike a deal first. The talks are complicated because the labels are pushing for greater control over the use of their work, while Udio and Suno are seeking flexibility to experiment and want deals at a price reasonable for startup companies. Advertisement Udio and Suno didn't respond to requests for comment. The three music companies declined to comment. Udio got $10 million last year from a group of investors that included venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, while Suno raised $125 million in a round that included Lightspeed Venture Partners. AI companies have battled major media companies over whether they need to pay to train their large language models on copyrighted work. They've argued that the training is covered under fair use, while rights holders say they must be compensated. The New York Times Co. sued OpenAI, which has struck licensing deals with companies such as News Corp., the Associated Press and Vox Media. The music industry has wrestled with how best to respond to the rise of AI technology. Industry sales have grown over the last decade, but have yet to fully recover from the damage wrought in the early days of the internet, when file sharing sites and piracy decimated sales. Record companies have battled every new technology, from file-sharing to user-generated content to streaming. But streaming services such as Spotify Technology SA have helped revive the industry. The industry has expressed a desire to protect its copyrights while also leaning into new technology. 'The music community has embraced AI, and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,' Mitch Glazier, chief executive officer of the RIAA, said when it filed the suit. 'But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us.' Advertisement With assistance from Rachel Metz.
CBC
08-04-2025
- Science
- CBC
#TheMoment an endangered tortoise became a first-time mom at almost 100
Rachel Metz of the Philadelphia Zoo recounts the moment 'Mommy' — a 97-year-old Western Santa Cruz Galapagos Tortoise — produced four new hatchlings, becoming the oldest known first-time mother of her species.
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Higher use of chatbots may lead to less socialising
By Rachel Metz (Bloomberg) — Higher use of chatbots like ChatGPT may correspond with increased loneliness and less time spent socialising with other people, according to new research from OpenAI in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Those who spent more time typing or speaking with ChatGPT each day tended to report higher levels of emotional dependence on, and problematic use of, the chatbot, as well as heightened levels of loneliness, according to research released Friday. The findings were part of a pair of studies conducted by researchers at the two organisations and have not been peer reviewed. The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 helped kick off a frenzy for generative artificial intelligence. Since then, people have used chatbots for everything from coding to ersatz therapy sessions. As developers like OpenAI push out more sophisticated models and voice features that make them better at mimicking the ways humans communicate, there is arguably more potential for forming parasocial relationships with these chatbots. In recent months, there have been renewed concerns about the potential emotional harms of this technology, particularly among younger users and those with mental health issues. Character Technologies Inc. was sued last year after its chatbot allegedly encouraged suicidal ideation in conversations with minors, including one 14-year-old who took his own life. San Francisco-based OpenAI sees the new studies as a way to get a better sense of how people interact with, and are affected by, its popular chatbot. 'Some of our goals here have really been to empower people to understand what their usage can mean and do this work to inform responsible design,' said Sandhini Agarwal, who heads OpenAI's trustworthy AI team and co-authored the research. To conduct the studies, the researchers followed nearly 1,000 people for a month. Participants had a wide range of prior experience with ChatGPT and were randomly assigned a text-only version of it or one of two different voice-based options to use for at least five minutes per day. Some were told to carry out open-ended chats about anything they wanted; others were told to have personal or non-personal conversations with the service. The researchers found that people who tend to get more emotionally attached in human relationships and are more trusting of the chatbot were more likely to feel lonelier and more emotionally dependent on ChatGPT. The researchers didn't find that a more engaging voice led to a more negative outcome, they the second study, researchers used software to analyze 3 million user conversations with ChatGPT and also surveyed people about how they interact with the chatbot. They found very few people actually use ChatGPT for emotional still early days for this body of research and remains unclear how much chatbots may cause people to feel lonelier versus how much people prone to a sense of loneliness and emotional dependence may have those feelings exacerbated by chatbots. Cathy Mengying Fang, a study co-author and MIT graduate student, said the researchers are wary of people using the findings to conclude that more usage of the chatbot will necessarily have negative consequences for users. The study didn't control for the amount of time people used the chatbot as a main factor, she said, and didn't compare to a control group that doesn't use chatbots. The researchers hope the work leads to more studies on how humans interact with AI. 'Focusing on the AI itself is interesting,' said Pat Pataranutaporn, a study co-author and a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. 'But what is really critical, especially when AI is being deployed at scale, is to understand its impact on people.' More stories like this are available on ©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
Bloomberg
30-01-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
OpenAI's New AI Agent Requires Lots of Adult Supervision
By Welcome to Tech In Depth, our revamped daily newsletter with reporting and analysis about the business of tech from Bloomberg's journalists around the world. Today, Rachel Metz tests out whether OpenAI's new agent can be the personal assistant she's always dreamed of having. Mark Zuckerberg's confidence: The Meta chief executive officer predicted a 'really big year' in which the social media company's 'highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant' will reach more than 1 billion people on its platforms.
