Tag: creators
TikTok creators sue Montana over statewide ban of the app
One day after Montana Governor signed the first statewide ban on TikTok into law, the measure is already facing a legal challenge. Five TikTok creators are suing in an effort to block the ban from taking effect.
In court filings, lawyers representing the TikTok creators say the ban is unconstitutional and that it violates their First Amendment rights. They also take issue with Montana’s supposed national security justification for the ban.
“Montana has no authority to enact laws advancing what it believes should be the United States’ foreign policy or its national security interests, nor may Montana ban an entire forum for communication based on its perceptions that some speech shared through that forum, though protected by the First Amendment, is dangerous,” the suit states. “Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes.”
In an interview on Fox News, Montana’s Attorney General, Austin Knudsen, said that legal challenges to the ban were expected. “There are some important issues here that I do think we probably need the federal courts to step in and answer for us here,” he said. “And that was part of our calculus in bringing this.”
The lawsuit is among the first legal challenges to the law, and will likely be closely watched as federal officials consider a nationwide ban on the app. Right now, the Montana ban is set to take effect January 1, 2024, though lawsuits challenging it could delay that timeline. TikTok itself hasn’t commented on whether it’s planning to bring its own litigation in Montana, but said in a statement following the bill’s signing that it planned “to defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tiktok-creators-sue-montana-over-statewide-ban-of-the-app-225725851.html?src=rss
The Creators of ‘Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’ Answer Your Most Urgent Questions
TikTok finally lets creators cash in on their viral effects
Since 2020, TikTok creators have been able to monetize their content through the Creator Fund, providing a revenue stream for videos that get a lot of views. But for the first time, the short video app is providing a path to financial rewards for another key creative force in TikTok culture: effects creators.
Today (May 16) TikTok announced Effect Creator Rewards, a $6 million fund to “celebrate and reward effect creators on TikTok.” In order to be eligible, creators must make their effects through Effect House, TikTok’s in-house augmented reality platform. According to TikTok’s announcement, the fund is only for creators based in U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Spain, the same countries eligible for the Creator Fund. The fund will pay creators based off of community engagement with their effects.
Effects are a crucial part of TikTok. The best effects can generate trends and discourse just as well as any viral sound, from the dangerous “bold glamour” filter to the tiny-faced bee effect that spawned hundreds and thousands of users sharing what no one can stop them from doing.
“For every effect that’s used in 500K unique videos within 90 days of being published, a creator will collect $700 USD. For every 100K videos published thereafter within the same 90 days, creators will collect an additional $140,” TikTok laid out in its statement.
To apply for the fund, creators must be 18 years or older and have at least 500K published TikTok videos using their effect.
In the press release, TikTok also announced the Creativity Program Beta, an improved version of its Creator Fund. “The Creativity Program Beta offers a new formula that provides a higher average gross revenue for qualified video views, giving creators the potential to earn higher rewards,” reads TikTok’s press release. “Additionally, the updated dashboard provides more insights, including estimated rewards, video performance metrics and analytics, and details on video eligibility.” As of January, creators only made around $0.02 and $0.04 for every 1,000 views from the Creator Fund, according to Tubefilter. Vice and Wired also reported on how little the average creator makes from the Creator Fund, so a change to the formula is welcome.
To qualify for the Creativity Program Beta, creators must be based in Britain, France, or U.S. and have at least 10,000 followers and 100,000 views over the past 30 days. Additionally, creators must post “high-quality, original content that is longer than one minute.”
TikTok launched the $200 million Creator Fund in 2020 and since added more ways for creators to monetize their content outside of brand sponsorships. Most recently, the platform introduced “Series” a way for eligible creators to post “Collections” of up to 80 videos behind a paywall. But Effect House Rewards is its first investment in effect creators.
Now when you post a video using the latest viral effect, you could finally be putting money into the hands of its creator.
TikTok opens a $6 million fund to pay creators of popular AR effects
TikTok creators who whip up popular effects will soon be rewarded as the platform has set up a new fund for them. Through the Effect Creator Rewards fund, the platform will pay those who create widely-used augmented reality effects using TikTok’s Effect House tool.
At the outset, the fund will only be available in a few countries. TikTok confirmed to TechCrunch that the eligible territories are the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
Payouts from the $6 million fund are based on engagement, but at the outset effects will need to meet quite a high threshold before creators are eligible to make money from them. For the time being, creators will earn $700 for each effect that’s used in 500,000 unique videos within 90 days of being published. For every 100,000 videos posted with the effect within the same period, the creator will earn $140. That’s a high bar to meet for a relatively small payment.
Although TikTok has other programs designed to reward creators, such as the $1 billion creator fund, those who are making content for the platform have complained about low payouts. Early last year, Hank Green estimated that he was making around 2.5 cents for every 1,000 views on TikTok. Other prominent creators, including YouTube megastar Mr. Beast, posted evidence of their paltry TikTok earnings.
Seemingly to address those complaints, TikTok recently overhauled the creator fund with an initiative called the Creativity Program. The aim, TikTok said, is to offer creators “higher average gross revenue for qualified video views.” The program is available in the US, France and Brazil for now.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tiktok-opens-a-6-million-fund-to-pay-creators-of-popular-ar-effects-163005838.html?src=rss
Kevin Systrom explains why Artifact wants to treat writers like the creators they are
Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have already shipped a ton of substantial updates for their news-focused app Artifact, which launched earlier this year but already looks very different from what debuted in January. On top of allowing users to follow writers on the platform, the latest update also provides a way for writers […]
Kevin Systrom explains why Artifact wants to treat writers like the creators they are by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Creators are ‘Interested’ In a Movie After Mario’s Success
Meta is making life even harder for its metaverse creators
Meta will no longer let creators using its Horizon Worlds social VR playscape make dedicated events, the company announced as part of the platform’s v109 update notes on Tuesday. It’s a surprising shutdown of a feature that some creators hoped would someday see improvements.
In March, I published a story about Horizon Worlds creators who run an in-VR comedy club, the Unknown Theater, and how they organized a VR protest over Meta’s treatment of events on the platform. The protestors took issue with changes that made community-organized events much more challenging to find, which poses a problem for the club’s regularly-scheduled shows, and the way Meta gave more prominence to high-profile events featuring big name stars like Carrie…
Swift Creator’s Company Builds New Programming Language ‘Mojo’ – a Python Superset
“But sadly,” Howard writes, Swift “did not receive the support it needed from either Apple or from Google, and it was not ultimately successful.” And yet…
[W]hilst at Google Chris did develop another project which became hugely successful: MLIR. MLIR is a replacement for LLVM’s intermediate representation [or IR] for the modern age of many-core computing and AI workloads. It’s critical for fully leveraging the power of hardware like GPUs, TPUs, and the vector units increasingly being added to server-class CPUs.
So, if Swift was “syntax sugar for LLVM”, what’s “syntax sugar for MLIR”? The answer is: Mojo! Mojo is a brand new language that’s designed to take full advantage of MLIR. And also Mojo is Python.
Wait what?
OK let me explain. Maybe it’s better to say Mojo is Python++. It will be (when complete) a strict superset of the Python language. But it also has additional functionality so we can write high performance code that takes advantage of modern accelerators…
Whereas Swift was a brand new language packing all kinds of cool features based on latest research in programming language design, Mojo is, at its heart, just Python. This seems wise, not just because Python is already well understood by millions of coders, but also because after decades of use its capabilities and limitations are now well understood. Relying on the latest programming language research is pretty cool, but its potentially-dangerous speculation because you never really know how things will turn out…
A key trick in Mojo is that you can opt in at any time to a faster “mode” as a developer, by using “fn” instead of “def” to create your function. In this mode, you have to declare exactly what the type of every variable is, and as a result Mojo can create optimised machine code to implement your function. Furthermore, if you use “struct” instead of “class”, your attributes will be tightly packed into memory, such that they can even be used in data structures without chasing pointers around. These are the kinds of features that allow languages like C to be so fast, and now they’re accessible to Python programmers too — just by learning a tiny bit of new syntax…
I can’t begin to describe all the little (and big!) ideas throughout Mojo’s design and implementation — it’s the result of Chris and his team’s decades of work on compiler and language design and includes all the tricks and hard-won experience from that time — but what I can describe is an amazing result that I saw with my own eyes.
Mojo hasn’t been released to the public yet, (other than an online “playground” with a waitlist where they’re “rolling out access slowly.”) But the blog post notes that creating a programming language’s syntax is usually complex, error-prone, and controversial — a problem Mojo neatly avoids by “outsourcing” its syntax to an existing language, “which also happens to be the most widely used language today.”
And “As a compiled language, Mojo’s deployment story is basically the same as C,” the post argues. [That is, “you can literally just make the compiled program available for direct download. It can be just 100k or so in size, and will launch and run quickly.”]
“This means that Mojo is far more than a language for AI/ML applications. It’s actually a version of Python that allows us to write fast, small, easily-deployed applications that take advantage of all available cores and accelerators!”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.