Technology Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

AI influencers and models will soon be able to battle it out for the title of Miss AI. The beauty pageant is the first of its kind, and would judge AI models based on their looks, content, social media presence, and clout. It would also consider the technical expertise that went into the crafting of the model and their profile.Biggest AI news of 2023: From Bad Bunny drama to AI modelsMeet Aitana, the Spanish AI model making thousands of dollars a monthA post shared by Aitana Lopez✨| Virtual Soul (@fit_aitana)Miss AI is a project developed by the World AI Creator Awards, and it’s their first contest.

Ivanka Trump is just as curious regarding ChatGPT as the rest of us. In a new Instagram story, Ivanka turned to the AI assistant tool to get some life advice. To make things more interesting, Ivanka had some special questions that involved some of Chevy Chase’s most famous work.Melania and Ivanka Trump’s relationship and the reason behind her ‘I Don’t Care’ jacket: New book claimsIvanka Trump nails a chic denim on denim while at NBA All-Star game with her familyIvanka was inspired by the film “Caddyshak,” starring Bill Murray and Chevy Chase.

SoundCloud will be put up for sale in 2024, Sky News reported on Sunday, with the streaming platform’s owners reportedly hoping to secure $1 billion in any potential deal. A SoundCloud representative declined to comment on the story when reached by The FADER.

The hottest celebrity couples that emerged in 2023Most Google searched celebrities in 2023When used in music, AI can create recordings of performers without their input. It can be a cause for celebration; in the case of The Beatles, it allowed them to release a song 45 years after the band’s dissolution and the death of one of its founding members. The song, titled “Now and Then,” has been one of the year’s biggest hits.

The trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI was released this week, arriving nearly a decade after the previous installment in the massively successful (and controversial) open-world action series. It wasn’t the first look at the game: a trove of in-game footage leaked in September 2022 revealed the game’s location (Vice City, a southern metropolis based on Miami) and its main characters, Lucia and Jason, among other key details.

Spotify has announced it is cutting 17% of its staff, with around 1800 jobs expected to be lost in the process. Chief executive Daniel Ek broke the news on Monday, saying in a public memo that the "difficult" decision was made in reponse to economic growth slowing "dramatically." Ek said "substantial action to rightsize our costs" was required in order for the company to reach its financial targets.

TikTok has won its first battle against the state of Montana. A federal judge has granted the video platform’s request for a preliminary injunction that will temporarily block the state’s ban of the app, Variety reports and court documents confirm. Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed the ban into law in May, claiming it was essential to “protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party” (TikTok is owned by the Chinese technology company ByteDance).

OpenAI has announced GPTs, a new platform for creating custom versions of their AI-based chatbots. The new venture is available now to paid ChatGPT subscribers and Enterprise users, and no previous coding experience is necessary to get started. GPTs was announced on November 6 during OpenAI’s developer conference, DevDay.

Spotify is planning to roll out major changes to its royalty model, Music Business Worldwide and Billboard report. Per those publications, the company will execute this plan in the first financial quarter of 2024 in an effort to “combat three drains on the royalty pool — all of which are currently stopping money from getting to working artists.” These drains, apparently, are low-streaming tracks, “fraudulent activity” on the platform, and non-music “noise” audio that, in the current model, is placed on par with bona fide songs.

Layoffs have hit Bandcamp, according to multiple posts from current and former employees on Twitter, with as many as half of the platform’s workforce cut from their jobs. Bandcamp was sold by Epic Games in September to Songtradr.

Tom Hanks has told his followers to be aware that a dental plan advert in which he appears is not all it seems. "BEWARE!" Hanks wrote in an Instagram post on Saturday.

95 percent of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are all but worthless now, according to a new study by crypto research group dappGambl. It’s no secret that the once-hyped crypto assets — pitched as viable revenue streams for artists and ways for fans to invest in the creators they loved — have lost ground after reaching a peak trading value of $17 billion in 2021.

Revenues for recorded music jumped to a new record of $8.4 billion during the first half of 2023, according to a new report released by the Recording Industry Association of America. Total revenues grew 9.3 percent over the same period in 2022. Streaming remains the overwhelming choice of music consumption, with 84 percent of all revenue stemming from the platforms.

TikTok has changed an entire generation's relationship with music, and now the video streaming platform has a Billboard chart of its own. The TikTok Billboard Top 50 was announced yesterday (September 14) by the long-running music industry publication. The chart assembles its list "based on creations, video views and user engagement," and topping the chart in its first week is "SkeeYee," the hit from St.

Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. has posted an Instagram video walking back comments published in the New York Times yesterday expressing support for the Grammy eligibility of "Heart on My Sleeve," a song created using deepfaked voice models of Drake and the Weeknd. Criticizing what he characterized as "bad and really inaccurate information," Mason Jr.

Voir Dire, the collaborative rap project between Earl Sweatshirt and veteran producer the Alchemist, was originally conceived as a needle in a digital haystack, a YouTube playlist buried under a fake name and burner account. The Alchemist first tweeted about the album in 2019; fast forward to 2021, and still no one had found it.

“Heart on My Sleeve,” a song created by the producer Ghostwriter using deepfaked vocal likenesses of Drake and The Weeknd, has been submitted to the Grammys for consideration, the New York Times reports. The song debuted in April and was created without the approval of either artist; after the song quickly became a viral sensation, Universal Music Group successfully pulled it from streaming services.

A newspaper investigation in Sweden has revealed that criminal gangs are using fake Spotify streams to launder money. The Svenska Dagbladet report (via The Guardian) claims that gang members take the money they make through criminal activity, including drug deals and contract killings, convert it into Bitcoin, and then pay for false Spotify streams of songs published by artists with ties to the gangs.

A consortium of major record labels including UMG, Sony, and Capitol have launched a copyright lawsuit against Internet Archive. The full complaint, which can be read here via Music Business Worldwide, targets the online library’s “Great 78 Project,” a digitized collection of 78-rpm records produced prior to 1972.

Universal Music Group and Google have started to discuss the prospect of officially licensing artists' voices for deepfakes, the Financial Times reports. Both parties reportedly hope to develop a tool that would allow the public to create their own officially licensed deepfakes. Presently, deepfakes are trained on machine learning programs to imitate the voices of singers without authorization; the phenomenon broke into public view with the April release of "heart on my sleeve," a song created with generated versions of Drake's and the Weeknd's voices.

Elon Musk has given Twitter a makeover, scrapping the blue bird icon for a new "minimalist art deco" X image. The Twitter owner first indicated his plans to change the old logo on Saturday before rolling out the new one in the early hours of Monday. The new image was created by one of Musk's followers, who has tweeted that he first created it for a now-defunct podcast.

At a Wednesday hearing in the U.S. Capital, Universal Music Group petitioned the Senate’s intellectual property subcommittee to enact legislature protecting artists and rights holders against AI copyright infringement, Music Business Worldwide reports.

In a new interview with BBC Radio 4, Paul McCartney revealed that a previously unreleased Beatles song is coming in 2023, and artificial intelligence programs were used in its creation. Speaking with Today's Martha Kearney, McCartney gave his thoughts on AI's "scary, but exciting" advancements before revealing that Peter Jackson, director of the 2022 Beatles documentary Get Back, was able to use AI tools to "extricate" John Lennon's vocals from a cassette demo.

Reddit has been hit by a major protest by users protesting the site owner's decision to begin charging third-party app developers for access to its data. It is estimated that over 6,000 subreddits went private on Monday as part of the protest to changes to Reddit's API (Application Programming Interface). These include the likes of r/funny, r/gaming, r/gadgets, and r/todayilearned, all with millions of subscribers each.

A radio host has filed a defamation lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, Variety reports and filings viewed by The FADER confirm. The suit was filed by Mark Walters, founder of Armed American Radio, on June 5 in Georgia’s Superior Court of Gwinnett County. Walters' suit alleges that Fred Riehl, editor of Ammoland.com, used ChatGPT to summarize Second Amendment Foundation (S.A.F.) v.

Ice Cube gave his thoughts on the state of modern rap during a recent appearance on the Full Send podcast, and the conversation inevitably turned to the genre's use of AI. The verdict is decidedly negative.

TikTok could be potentially made unavailable to residents of Montana after Governor Greg Gianforte signed a bill on Wednesday, May 17, effectively banning the company from operating in the state, the New York Times reports. Gianforte cited national security concerns in his decision to sign the bill, which will likely face legal challenges that delay it passing into law.

Holly Herndon is an artist, composer, and computer scientist who has been operating at the intersection of AI and music for years. That's why it’s a good idea to listen when she has some advice for artists as the music industry changes with AI’s many advancements, as she did yesterday (May 15), cautioning artists against signing away the rights to their vocals for programs that could use them for generative AI programs, at least for the time being..

Boomy, a program that uses AI to generate entire songs, announced on May 1 that Spotify had launched a crackdown on tracks created using its technology that had been uploaded to the platform. In a statement to Music Business Worldwide published two days later, a representative for Spotify said that the company had detected illegitimate streams on a number of Boomy-generated songs and taken down the offenders.

Last week, Grimes gave creatives the go-ahead to use AI-generated versions of her voice in their art, offering a 50% royalty split and musing on the possibility of "open sourcing all art and killing copyright." On April 30, she shared a beta version of the GrimesAI-1 Voiceprint. Users who upload their vocal files to the site will receive output audio generated in the style of Grimes' voice. “If you are signed to a label or wish to distribute it yrself," Grimes wrote on Twitter, "plz email us at [email protected]." She requested that the songs using her voice be "tasteful" — last week, Grimes said "rly rly toxic lyrics w grimes voice" such as "baby murder" songs or "Nazi anthems" will face takedown notices.

Last month Elon Musk called time on what he has been calling "legacy verified users," meaning anyone that wanted a blue check mark on their account would have to subscribe to Twitter Blue and pay $8 a month for the pleasure. The uptake hasn't exactly been overwhelming, with TechCrunch reporting that the relaunched subscription service made just $11M on mobile in its first 3 months.

This past Friday (April 14), the British band Breezer released a “lost” Oasis album they’d created using AI. AISIS’ The Lost Tapes/Vol.1 was, in fact, written by Breezer, but the band is fronted by a digitally programmed Liam Gallagher.

Adam Moskowitz — the attorney in charge of a class action lawsuit brought against FTX promoters including Shaquille O’Neal, Tom Brady, and Larry David — says Taylor Swift was one of only several celebrities who did their due diligence before agreeing to promote the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange. On a new episode of The Scoop, a podcast from the crypto-focused online publication The Block, Moskowitz recalls his surprise at how many hugely popular figures hadn’t checked in with their own lawyers before signing massive contracts with the shady firm.

Universal Music Group has been in correspondence with the major music streaming platforms, including Apple Music and Spotify, to demand that the companies help block the AI programs that are creating new songs based on the music of UMG artists. A report published last week by the Financial Times contains emails and interviews with sources close to UMG.

Donald Glover's multimedia company Gilga has put out an open call for applications in nine different roles. The multimedia company was detailed in a recent GQ profile outlining Glover's vision for a production studio, incubator, restaurant, and beyond.

Management for Bandcamp contacted Topshelf Records on Friday (April 7) and asked them to cease its support for the music platform’s nascent union, Bandcamp United, according to a statement from the record label’s official Twitter account. Topshelf says that the label was “petitioned to cease supporting [Bandcamp United],” a request they declined.