Hollywood actors and producers are standing behind a new AI licensing standard that will tell AI systems whether they’ll need to pay to use a person’s likeness, creative work, characters, and designs. With the Human Consent Standard, people can set terms for the use of their work or likeness, including giving AI systems full permission […]
Substack, the once buzzy newsletter platform, is losing a new swath of writers to rival platforms most people haven’t heard of. Just last month, The Ankler, one of Substack’s most popular publications, left for a platform that gives it more control over its site. Others who have departed Substack within the past year voiced similar […]
Cloudflare, the cloud provider that connects millions of sites to the internet, wants to “fix” another digital giant: WordPress. It announced a new open-source system, called EmDash, that’s supposed to address the “core problems that WordPress cannot solve” – and they want to do it by allowing AI agents to take control of your website. […]
Google’s Chrome browser is getting a couple of new features, both of them extremely welcome and wildly overdue. The first is a reading mode, which does what it already does in most other browsers: strip out a lot of website cruft to make pages easier to read. Reading mode is good, you should use it, […]
Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially exiting beta. The Organization for Transformative Works – the nonprofit behind the fanfiction site – announced the update on Thursday, which comes 17 years after AO3’s launch in 2009. “Since 2009, AO3 has grown and changed a lot,” the announcement says. “We’ve introduced many features over the years […]
Surf is a slightly hard app to explain. It’s sort of three things: a client for fediverse apps like Bluesky and Mastodon; a feed reader that lets you subscribe to almost any website, podcast, or YouTube channel; and a tool for creating and following feeds of interesting content, a la Flipboard magazines. It’s a browser […]
Wikipedia will no longer allow editors to write or rewrite articles using AI. The update, which was added to Wikipedia’s guidelines late last week, cites the tendency for AI-written articles to violate “several of Wikipedia’s core content policies” as the reason for the ban. The change applies to the English version of Wikipedia and will […]
Today, I’m talking with Shishir Mehrotra, who is CEO of Superhuman — that’s the company formerly known as Grammarly, which is still its flagship product. Shishir also used to be the chief product officer at YouTube, and he’s on the board of directors at Spotify. He’s a fascinating guy, and we actually scheduled this interview […]
Since roughly the turn of the millennium, Google Search has been the bedrock of the web. People loved Google’s trustworthy “10 blue links” search experience and its unspoken promise: The website you click is the website you get. Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated. […]
AI bots may outnumber humans online by 2027, says Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, as generative AI agents dramatically increase web traffic and infrastructure demands.