Over the Summer break, Startup Daily is republishing key stories from 2025. This opinion piece from editor Simon Thomsen first appeared in March as news emerged of Meta’s use of Library Genesis, an online warehouse of stolen intellectual property, to train its AI, emerged. This year marks 20 years since Mark Zuckberg launched Facebook, having… Read more »
Imagine this: a band removes its entire music catalogue off Spotify in protest, only to discover an AI-generated impersonator has replaced it. The impersonator offers songs that sound much like the band’s originals. The imposter tops Spotify search results for the band’s music – attracting significant streams – and goes undetected for months. As incredible… Read more »
In the eyes of big AI companies such as OpenAI, the troves of data on the internet are highly valuable. They scrape photos, videos, books, blog posts, albums, painting, photographs and much more to train their products such as ChatGPT – usually without any compensation to or consent from the creators. In fact, OpenAI and… Read more »
The federal Labor government has flatly rejected calls from the likes of Google, OpenAI, and the Productivity Commission to carve out a copyright exemption for AI training data.
Australian creatives should be properly compensated when their copyrighted works are used to train artificial intelligence models, prominent musicians, writers, and industry groups told a Senate committee hearing last Tuesday. Artists fronted the inquiry as Australia’s Productivity Commission consults on whether a new “fair dealing” exception should be introduced to allow local companies to use Australians’ copyrighted… Read more »
Atlassian cofounder Scott Farquhar said he wouldn’t mind if others took the $60 billion tech company’s intellectual property without paying for it if it leads to better software. The Tech Council of Australia chair, who stepped down as Atlassian co-CEO last year, but remains on the board, has been advocating for changes to Australian copyright… Read more »
There’s so much that sucks about Large Language Models, machine intelligence, spicy autocorrect, whatever you want to call it. But perhaps the deepest suck of all is that the worst people in the world control it. It’s Zuck. It’s Elon. It’s the fanboys of the Torment Nexus. These are the lizard people we’ve handed the… Read more »
Plagiarism accusations against Brooke Bellamy, first brought to light by Nagi Maehashi on her website RecipeTin Eats, continue to emerge. This week, it was reported that Bellamy has been dropped as an ambassador for the Academy for Enterprising Girls’ program for young girls in business. And a second cookbook author has come forward. High-profile US baker,… Read more »
Companies developing AI models, such as OpenAI and Meta, train their systems on enormous datasets. These consist of text from newspapers, books (often sourced from unauthorised repositories), academic publications and various internet sources. The material includes works that are copyrighted. The Atlantic magazine recently alleged Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had used LibGen,… Read more »
This year marks 20 years since Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, having kicked it off as The Facebook in 2004. He was already notorious for Facemash, the “hot or not” site that ranked Harvard students by their attractiveness, which he created in late 2003. Zuckerberg hacked into house face book websites at the university to get… Read more »
The British feminist writer Angela Carter wrote that “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people”. And right now, quite a few people are chuckling at a tragedy that’s befallen OpenAI amid claims that Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek “stole” the US startup’s data to train its large language model (LLM), R1. A quick recap… Read more »
Last month, several major record labels filed copyright infringement lawsuits in US courts against the makers of two generative AI music apps, Suno and Udio. The labels allege the AI companies have engaged in copyright infringement by copying many sound recordings belonging to the record labels, and producing outputs very similar to those recordings. The… Read more »
Artificial intelligence (AI) text and image generation tools have now been around for a while, but in recent weeks, apps for making AI-generated music have reached consumers as well. Just like other generative AI tools, the two products – Suno and Udio (and others likely to come) – work by turning a user’s prompt into… Read more »
Imagine this. You need an image of a balloon for a work presentation and turn to a text-to-image generator, like Midjourney or DALL-E, to create a suitable image. You enter the prompt: “red balloon against a blue sky” but the generator returns an image of an egg instead. You try again but this time, the… Read more »
Australian design platform Canva is seeking to address the fundamental concerns of the creator economy in the wake of the Hollywood writers strike by offering an artificial intelligence (AI) royalty program over the next three years as part of its new product release, AI design tool Magic Studio. Cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins said the… Read more »
Daily startup news and insights, delivered to your inbox.
