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Journalists, researchers, and politicians are mourning Meta’s shutdown of CrowdTangle, which they used to track the spread of disinformation on Facebook and Instagram. In CrowdTangle’s place, Meta is offering its Content Library – but is limiting usage to people from “qualified academic or nonprofit institutions who are pursuing scientific or public interest research.” Many researchers

The latest generative models make for great demos, but are they really about to change how people make movies and TV? Not in the short term, according to filmmaking and VFX experts — but in the long term, the changes could be literally beyond our imagining. On a panel at SIGGRAPH in Denver, Nikola Todorovic

Big day for VR motion peripherals. An hour after Roto VR announced its $799 spinning game chair, Virtuix has finally revealed a September 10 launch date for its Omni One VR treadmill. I say “finally” because this $2,595 (plus shipping) system has been in the works for more than a decade now. In fact, the

After much back and forth earlier this year, Spotify on Wednesday says it’s now received approval from Apple to display pricing information in its iOS app for users in the EU. The company is not opting into Apple’s new business rules under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, but rather is taking advantage of new antitrust

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have acquired a screenplay called “Killing Gawker,” which presumably delves into billionaire VC Peter Thiel’s campaign to bury the media outfit for posting excerpts from a Hulk Hogan sex tape. The film is based on a book that details the 2016 court case in which Hogan won a $140 million

In line with Elon Musk’s increasing rhetoric on X of going back to the good old days, Tesla looks like it’s finally getting ready to open its 1950s-style diner.  Tesla is seeking a Tesla Diner Experience Specialist in Los Angeles to work with the charging operations team to ensure “exceptional customer experience at the Tesla

Meta and Universal Music Group (UMG) announced on Monday the expansion of their multi-year music licensing agreement, which enables users to share songs from UMG’s music library across Meta’s platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Horizon, Threads and WhatsApp) without violating copyright.  What’s most notable about the new agreement is that it states that the two companies are

Susan Wojcicki, a longtime Googler who spent nearly a decade as the CEO of YouTube, passed away Friday after a two-year battle with non-small cell lung cancer. Wojcicki, who was 56, famously rented the garage of her Menlo Park home to Larry Page and Sergey Brin as they were starting Google. She then became one

TikTok’s latest offering is capitalizing on the app’s ability to serve as a discovery engine for other media — something its users already take advantage of by sharing short clips of movies and TV shows. Today, the company is partnering with studios like Warner Bros. to launch a feature that lets users discover movies and

Automattic, the owner of WordPress.com, has launched a new AI tool designed to help bloggers write more clearly and succinctly. The tool joins a swathe of writing assistants launched over recent years by the likes of privacy app maker Proton as well as the mighty Google. Write Brief with AI, as Automattic’s new tool is

Live sports are finally moving onto streaming in a serious way, with a new service called Venu Sports set to launch this fall. This is a joint venture between Disney and Fox (which are part of the same company), as well as Warner Bros. Discovery. It will include 14 live sports channels, including the various

Amazon Music announced Tuesday the launch of its new AI-powered feature, “Topics,” which allows users to explore podcast episodes by specific topics discussed in the episode.  When you visit the page of a podcast episode, look for new Topic tags below the episode description. You can tap on a tag to see a list of

Following the recent lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music generation startups Udio and Suno, Suno admitted in a court filing on Thursday that it did, in fact, train its AI model using copyrighted songs. But it claimed that doing so was legal under the fair-use doctrine. The RIAA filed the lawsuit

When Xiaoyin Qu was growing up in China, she was obsessed with learning how to build paper airplanes that could do flips in the air. Her parents, though, didn’t have the aerodynamic expertise to support her newfound passion, and her teachers were too overwhelmed to give her dedicated attention.  “That’s why I wanted to build

Perplexity AI will soon start sharing advertising revenue with news publishers when its chatbot surfaces their content in response to a user query, a move that appears designed to assuage critics that have accused the startup of plagiarism and unethical web scraping.  Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s head of business, told TechCrunch that the company was actually

A fireside chat on Monday between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the SIGGRAPH 2024 conference in Colorado took a few unexpected turns. It started innocently enough, with Huang waxing positive about the capabilities of Nvidia GPUs and Zuckerberg speaking about his vision of an AI chatbot future. But by the

The first time I saw Google’s latest commercial, I wondered, “Is it just me, or is this kind of bad?” By the fourth or fifth time I saw it, I’d stopped wondering. It starts innocuously enough, with a father talking about how much his daughter loves Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (she “might even be the world’s number

A powerful new video-generating AI model became widely available today — but there’s a catch: The model appears to be censoring topics deemed too politically sensitive by the government in its country of origin, China. The model, Kling, developed by Beijing-based company Kuaishou, launched in waitlisted access earlier in the year for users with a

Alongside a slew of announcements for Play—such as AI-powered app comparisons and a feature that bundles similar apps—Google has introduced new “Curated Spaces,” hubs dedicated to specific topics. Announced Wednesday, “Comics,” is designed to appeal to manga fans. Positioned at the top of the screen in between “For You” and “Top Charts,” the new hub

Content creators are busy people. Most spend more than 20 hours a week creating new content for their respective corners of the web. That doesn’t leave much time for audience engagement. But Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, thinks that AI could solve this problem. In an interview with internet personality Rowan Cheung, Zuckerberg laid out his

Brian Kim, the founder of South Korean internet giant Kakao, was arrested Tuesday on allegations of stock price manipulation related to the company’s takeover of K-pop agency SM Entertainment in 2023. The Seoul Southern District Court said on Tuesday that it had issued a warrant for Kim’s arrest after a hearing on Monday due to

TikTok is partnering with the music distribution service DistroKit to fast-track the creation of artist accounts for members. The ByteDance-owned short video platform introduced an Artist Account feature last year to let musicians showcase their new music along with their music catalog on the platform and behind-the-scenes footage. Typically, it takes up to 30 days

What do MrBeast, John Oliver and the Wall Street Journal have in common? The transcripts of their YouTube videos have been scraped to train the AI used by companies like Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple and Salesforce. An investigation from Wired and Proof News found that this dataset, which is called YouTube Subtitles, contains transcripts from over

Apple on Thursday announced its upcoming lineup of immersive video content for the Vision Pro. The list includes behind-the-scenes footage of the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend, an immersive performance by The Weeknd, new series, films, concerts and more. The headset launched in February with more than 150 3D movies and immersive titles. Apple is adding

Spotify’s AI DJ feature, an AI guide that introduces personalized song selections, is now available in its first language outside of English. On Tuesday, Spotify announced the launch of an AI DJ that speaks Spanish, confirming TechCrunch’s earlier reports of the feature under development. Like the original AI DJ “X,” whose voice was based on

South Korean prosecutors said on Wednesday that they have filed an arrest warrant for Brian Kim, the founder of Korean internet giant Kakao, as part of an investigation into alleged stock market manipulation related to a high-profile bidding war for SM Entertainment, one of the country’s biggest music labels, in 2023. The warrant comes a

Meta announced former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts will no longer be subject to heightened suspension penalties, according to an updated blog post on Friday. The company says it made the decision to ensure all Presidential nominees were on equal footing on their platform ahead of the 2024 Presidential election. When Meta reinstated

As competition with TikTok and Reels heats up, YouTube on Thursday announced a slate of new features designed to make its short-form video product, YouTube Shorts, more compelling. In a video update for creators, YouTube Chief Product Officer Johanna Voolich introduced six new tools that will help creators craft their Shorts videos, including those that

Vimeo joins companies TikTok, YouTube, and Meta in implementing a way for creators to label AI-generated content. The video hosting service announced on Wednesday that creators must now disclose to viewers when realistic content is created with AI.  The new updates to Vimeo’s terms of service and community guidelines ensure that videos that are AI-generated,

With Spotify’s recent launch of comments on podcasts, the streamer is taking yet another step toward building a social networking experience in an app primarily known for music. With comments, podcasters can now engage with their listeners directly within Spotify, as they can with other interactive features like Polls and Q&As. Combined with the app’s