AI Bots Stole My Music; Philadelphia Magazine, July 10, 2026

 Owen Lyman-Schmidt, Philadelphia Magazine; AI Bots Stole My Music

One West Philly musician’s surreal, unsettling journey into the world of fake artists, bot listeners, and the streaming industry that’s failing creators. 

"The fear that Carey Dupont would replace us wasn’t just some abstract notion; in the year before we found it, the tracks on Blue Road had been listened to close to 50,000 times each. By contrast, many of the original recordings had only 1,000 to 2,000 listens despite being released four years earlier. Someone was using our music to play the streaming game and was massively outperforming us."

Meta Removes A.I. Feature on Instagram After Days of Backlash; The New York Times, July 10, 2026

 Eli Tan, The New York Times; Meta Removes A.I. Feature on Instagram After Days of Backlash

Users and Hollywood agencies raised privacy and copyright concerns about the new tool, Muse Image.

[Kip Currier: Another example that if enough people speak up about a controversial technology issue that really matters to them, tech companies like Meta will -- sometimes -- back off.

The specter of more copyright infringement litigation was also a significant incentive for Meta to "pause" the availability of the AI tool Muse Image on Instagram. Muse Image enables users to create new images by using content accessed via Instagram accounts as "raw material" for generating AI-generated pictures.]

"Meta on Friday paused a new artificial intelligence feature on Instagram that allowed users to generate images based on people’s public accounts, citing widespread criticism.

The feature, which Meta unveiled on Tuesday, automatically opted in any Instagram user with a public account. As a result, countless people’s likenesses were used in A.I. images without their consent. Users complained about privacy and copyright concerns."

The Work of Helping A.I. Destroy Work; The New York Times, July 10, 2026

  Lora Kelley , The New York Times; The Work of Helping A.I. Destroy Work

"Every day, Mercor, a start-up that sells training data to artificial intelligence companies, pays 30,000 contractors more than $4 million to help make their jobs, and those of their colleagues, obsolete.

It’s gig work, but for professionals with rarefied skills. One recent Mercor posting offered $225 an hour for a voice actor able to maintain a customer service persona in fluent Hebrew. Another sought a Ph.D. physicist with a specialization in general relativity, astrophysics or cosmology. A third listing wanted a physician with more than three years of experience in the Rwandan primary care medical system.

Mercor and a handful of similar start-ups are the primary middlemen in a supply chain of “human data” that may power the next generation of A.I. As OpenAI, Anthropic and other major ventures compete to become the industry’s dominant platform, the market for premium data that has been vetted by experts is exploding.

No longer do the A.I. companies need armies of low-paid workers, often overseas, to do rote tasks like tag images of cars or transcribe audio. They need mathematicians to annotate proofs, lawyers to mark up briefs and professors to grade essays. That’s what Mercor and its rivals supply. To use the parlance of the industry, data labeling has moved up the “value chain,” and the start-ups that offer this service have become some of the fastest growing in Silicon Valley."

OpenAI may have made a fatal misstep in copyright fight with news orgs; Ars Technica, July 9, 2026

ASHLEY BELANGER  , Ars Technica; OpenAI may have made a fatal misstep in copyright fight with news orgs

"OpenAI is facing calls for “serious sanctions” after fighting to keep news organizations from snooping through millions of logs to find evidence of users skirting their paywalls by prompting ChatGPT to regurgitate their articles.

This evidence is considered among the most important to both sides, potentially either dooming OpenAI as an infringer or exonerating its chatbot technology as a transformative fair use of news sites’ content."

Meta Now Lets Anyone Use Your Instagram Photos in AI Images—Unless You Opt Out; Wired, July 7, 2026

 Reece Rogers, Wired; Meta Now Lets Anyone Use Your Instagram Photos in AI Images—Unless You Opt Out

"META LAUNCHED ITS inaugural AI image model from the Meta Superintelligence Labs on Tuesday, its effort to compete with the likes of OpenAI’s GPT Images 2.0and Google’s Nano Banana 2 in the AI image generation race.

The new model, called Muse Image, rolled out with deep integrations woven into the Instagram app. As part of this update, public Instagram profiles are now automatically opted into being fodder for generative AI remixes. All someone has to do is tag your account’s profile in a prompt—if it’s public—and they can use Meta AI to generate an image using your likeness."

They built the world’s most powerful AI. They’re facing a mystery they can’t explain.; The Washington Post, July 1, 2026

 Nitasha Tiku, The Washington Post ; They built the world’s most powerful AI. They’re facing a mystery they can’t explain.

"Anthropic, Google and Meta have over the past year hired computer scientists, neuroscientists and philosophers to study concepts like the welfare of AI models or whether chatbots have forms of emotion. AI companies are collaborating with nonprofits, researchers and academic centers, who warn of an ethical crisis if the digital helpers used by millions of people for homework, coding, office work and therapy one day begin to feel that they hate their job."

The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors; The New York Times Magazine, July 5, 2026

 Benjamin Wallace, The New York Times Magazine; The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors

"One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other. A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions, and its own set of new ones that they are uniquely trained to engage with: of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians); of mind and consciousness (philosophers of mind and consciousness). For ethicists, in particular, A.I. is a bonanza. How should models act toward us? How should humans interact with them? Where would purpose come from in a post-work society?"

Midjourney Seeks to Reveal Studios’ Use of AI in High-Stakes Copyright Battle; Variety, July 2, 2026

Gene Madders, Variety; Midjourney Seeks to Reveal Studios’ Use of AI in High-Stakes Copyright Battle

"Midjourney is trying to force Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. to reveal how they use artificial intelligence as it defends itself from a potentially ruinous copyright lawsuit."

AI Costs More Than The People It Replaced; Forbes, July 2, 2026

 Jemma Green , Forbes; AI Costs More Than The People It Replaced

"Something odd is happening in the tech world right now: the technology that was supposed to make human labour obsolete is, at this moment, more expensive than the humans it was meant to replace."

Microsoft Shareholder Sues Top Brass for AI Copyright Claims; Bloomberg Law, July 1, 2026

Rebecca Klar

 , Bloomberg Law; Microsoft Shareholder Sues Top Brass for AI Copyright Claims

"Microsoft Corp.'s executives and board directors misled shareholders in statements concealing its artificial intelligence tools were trained on copyrighted material, a new investor lawsuit said. 

The tech giant’s false statements about its AI strategy and violations of intellectual property law caused substantial damage to Microsoft and its shareholders, according to Eric Anderson’s stockholder derivative lawsuit filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington."

NYT slams Microsoft for building copyright-infringing supercomputer for OpenAI; Ars Technica, June 26, 2026

ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica; NYT slams Microsoft for building copyright-infringing supercomputer for OpenAI

"In a heavily redacted court filing Thursday, The New York Times proposed to amend its copyright complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft to clarify a claim and allege that Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal NYT works by building a bespoke supercomputing system ranked among the most powerful in the world."

The AI backlash is only getting started; The Economist, June 25, 2026

  The Economist; The AI backlash is only getting started

"Advances in artificial intelligence have long terrified techies. Lately, voters are feeling the angst, too. ai is unpopular in the West and climbing up the political agenda. The fiercest fights so far have been in America, where protests against data centres have scuppered nearly $100bn-worth of projects, warring ai megadonors have just dumped tens of millions into a Manhattan congressional race and around 40% of voters tell pollsters that they want ai banned from most industries. But spats are breaking out elsewhere: after chipmaking profits soared recently, workers at Samsung in South Korea threatened a strike to secure special payouts."

The New York Times Amends Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Microsoft; The New York Times, June 25, 2026

Cade Metz , The New York Times; The New York Times Amends Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Microsoft

"The New York Times amended its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on Thursday, modifying one claim against Microsoft and dropping another against OpenAI, according to a legal filing in federal court...

In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, The Times accused Microsoft of encouraging OpenAI to train its A.I. systems using copyrighted articles from The Times and of providing services designed to help with this training.

The Times also dropped a claim from its original lawsuit, filed in 2023, accusing OpenAI of “secondarily” infringing on its copyrights because it did not prevent consumers and businesses from generating copyrighted material using A.I."

How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots; Ars Technica, June 23, 2026

 JENNIFER OUELLETTE , Ars Technica; How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

Sci-fi author/tech journalist Cory Doctorow on his new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.

"Doctorow is not virulently anti-AI; he uses AI tools regularly and sees potential in many of those tools as useful plugins or cool new apps. But he is nonetheless alarmed at all the hype surrounding AI, the enormous capital expenditures, the unrealistic expectations and self-serving messaging, and the potentially catastrophic economic consequences when the AI bubble inevitably pops...

Ars Technica: Why do you think AI is so appealing to political and business leaders in particular? 

Cory Doctorow: It’s not just that it makes for a good demo. AI really appeals to a fantasy that I think all of us have to some extent but that powerful people really have, of a world without people in it—because hell really is other people. You can’t get stuff done without other people helping you. You can’t have romance without a romantic partner. You can’t have social media without people to socialize with. You can’t play a board game, or do a startup, or build a bridge, or build a house, or do politics without other people. And other people stubbornly refuse to organize everything they do to make you happy.

Particularly if you’re rich and powerful, it’s very galling. So AI is very attractive. One of the reasons DOGE fired so many government workers was because it played into the fantasy that you can have a government without government employees. In the corporate sphere, it’s the fantasy of a business without workers, because every corporate leader is haunted by the secret fear that if they don’t show up for work, everything goes on just fine. But if the workers don’t show up, everything shuts down. Maybe they’re not really driving the car, maybe they’re strapped in the backseat with a toy steering wheel."

Nearly 400 local newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft over alleged copyright theft; New Jersey Globe, June 24, 2025

David Wildstein, New Jersey Globe ; Nearly 400 local newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft over alleged copyright theft

"The massive coalition of local newspaper publishers filed a federal lawsuit today against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the technology companies systematically copied copyrighted reporting from nearly 400 local newspapers to train and develop commercial artificial intelligence products, including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, without permission or compensation.

The publishers, represented by Platkin LLP, a law firm founded earlier this year by former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin, contend that OpenAI and Microsoft unlawfully appropriated original news content to build their AI systems, violating the Copyright Act and threatening the future of local journalism.

The lawsuit also alleges that OpenAI knowingly stripped copyright management information from publishers’ work — including author bylines, copyright notices, and terms of use information — in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The complaint cites remarks by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, who acknowledged during testimony before the British House of Lords that it would be “impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”"

Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers; The Economist, June 24, 2026

 The Economist; Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers

"Ten years ago, as the ai revolution was gathering pace, arts and humanities students were told that, if they wanted to make themselves employable, they should “learn to code”. That may have been bad advice. These days, it is programmers who are nervous about ai taking their jobs."

Even in Defeat, a Democrat Showed the Upside of Angering the A.I. Industry; The New York Times, June 24, 2026

 Theodore Schleifer , The New York Times; Even in Defeat, a Democrat Showed the Upside of Angering the A.I. Industry

Alex Bores’s close loss in New York could pave the way for other Democrats to take political advantage of being attacked by the increasingly unpopular A.I. industry.

"The New York race — the first in the country to draw such large amounts of money from A.I. interests — signaled the battles to come over an industry that has quickly grown more unpopular with voters but has astronomical sums of money it can use to shape how it is regulated.

Mr. Bores’s respectable showing demonstrated how tech-skeptical Democratic candidates might be able to exploit the political liabilities of the A.I. industry, which is engaged in a midterm proxy war between two of its top companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, and their allied super PACs."

Archiving with AI; Library Journal, June 8, 2026

 Matt Enis, Library Journal; Archiving with AI

"AI companies are offering some libraries funding for digitization projects, but archives and special collections are working through how to manage projects responsibly

“Imagine a world where you know things but cannot say where you learned them,” begins “Memory Without Origin,” a paper published in April by University of Virginia (UVA) Dean of Libraries and University Librarian Leo S. Lo. This isn’t a hypothetical question, Lo notes, it’s a predictable consequence if libraries allow generative artificial intelligence (AI) to ingest archival materials as training data without requiring provenance conditions. And libraries, which could always use funding for projects involving digitization, special collections, and archives, are being approached by AI companies with deep pockets.

“They’ve been approaching a lot of larger research libraries, including Oxford and many more,” Lo tells LJ. (Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries began a digitization pilot project funded by ChatGPT maker OpenAI last year.) “Usually the offer is: they will pay you to digitize materials—which we want, because we want to make them more accessible—and in return, depending on the deal…they would like to have the data to train their AI models.”

These partnerships can benefit both parties, but for libraries, the consequences of getting these arrangements wrong “are more permanent than anything the profession has previously encountered,” Lo writes. “Once archival materials are absorbed into foundation model weights, no subsequent institutional action can remove them from the model.” If proper care isn’t taken, that information becomes unmoored from its former context within an archive."

Navigating Today’s AI Landscape with an Ethical Polestar; American Bar Association (ABA), April 30, 2026

 Afton Pavletic ,  American Bar Association (ABA); Navigating Today’s AI Landscape with an Ethical Polestar

"On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the general public. The model, along with other generative AI (GenAI) technologies, flooded headlines and seized the spotlight. Less than six months later, the story of Mata v. Avianca, Inc.  —a case in which the plaintiff’s attorneys filed a brief featuring ChatGPT-hallucinated case citations—went viral and fired an emergency flare in the legal community. With a growing awareness of AI’s potential to transform the profession, the legal field responded with a cascade of AI guardrails, guidelines, and task forces. Judges targeted GenAI usage with standing orders, at times outright prohibiting the use of the technology   ; state bars and legal associations issued opinions and recommendations tailored to the Rules of Professional Conduct  ; law firms and government agencies crafted AI-use policies for their offices  ; and the list goes on.

So where are we today? With avoiding ethical missteps as its compass, this article seeks to map out the current AI legal landscape. After launching from the shores of the Rules of Professional Conduct, it will discuss prevalent technologies in use by legal practitioners, the risks associated with the current wave of AI, how courts have responded to AI-related issues, and ways to steer your practice’s AI policy to avoid troubled waters."

AI helped diagnose 18 children whose rare diseases had stumped doctors; NBC News, June 18, 2026

  Hallie Jackson, NBC News; AI helped diagnose 18 children whose rare diseases had stumped doctors

"New research from Boston Children's Hospital’s center for rare diseases and the AI company OpenAI reveals that off-the-shelf AI tools can help identify which errors in patients’ genomes might be causing the children’s diseases. NBC News' Jared Perlo discusses the findings of the research."