The most disturbing corporate harassment campaign in recent tech history has a price. eBay and three of its former executives will pay nearly $56m to the couple they set out to destroy for writing a critical newsletter. David and Ina Steiner of Natick,…
Fish Audio, a Palo Alto voice-AI startup, has raised $52m in a round it still calls a seed, first reported by TechCrunch. It arrives at a company with an unusual shape. It gives its best models away, and charges for the wiring around them. The startup …
In China, the AI boom that put actors and models out of work has found a new use for them. It is renting their faces. A growing set of platforms now pays people $15 to $700 to license their likeness for AI-generated content, Rest of World reported. Pro…
Google built one of the world’s largest companies by scraping the entire web without asking permission first. This week a court told Google it cannot stop others from scraping Google. On 20 July, a federal judge dismissed Google’s lawsuit against SerpA…
Ask ChatGPT for a chapter in the voice of Stephen King and it now says no. It offers instead to write something with “the hallmarks of atmospheric, character-driven horror and small-town dread,” while staying “its own.” OpenAI has quietly changed how i…
Peacock Premium will be included with YouTube Premium in the US at no extra cost starting in early 2027. The deal, announced on Sunday by NBCUniversal and YouTube, is Peacock’s largest wholesale distribution partnership to date and immediately expands …
Paramount just paused its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Independent creators are scared, but after ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms,’ they have more ownership.
Patreon is cutting a fifth of its staff. Its founder wants you to know it is not because of AI. On Thursday the creator-payments company laid off 93 people, about 20% of its workforce, as 404 Media first reported. Chief executive Jack Conte called the …
Jeff Bezos has been approached to join a consortium seeking to buy a 30% stake in Liverpool Football Club from Fenway Sports Group, Sky Sports reported. The group is led by Amit Bhatia, the outgoing co-owner of Queens Park Rangers and son-in-law of ste…
YouTube creator Gossip Goblin brings AI-assisted feature “Gods Don’t Give Gifts” to U.S. theaters, testing whether online fandom can drive box office.