Tag: dollars
Scammers used AI-generated Frank Ocean songs to steal thousands of dollars
More AI-generated music mimicking a famous artist has made the rounds — while making lots of money for the scammer passing it off as genuine. A collection of fake Frank Ocean songs sold for a reported $13,000 CAD ($9,722 in US dollars) last month on a music-leaking forum devoted to the Grammy-winning singer, according toVice. If the story sounds familiar, it’s essentially a recycling of last month’s AI Drake / The Weeknd fiasco.
As generative AI takes the world by storm — Google just devoted most of its I/O 2023 keynote to it — people eager to make a quick buck through unscrupulous means are seizing the moment before copyright laws catch up. It’s also caused headaches for Spotify, which recently pulled not just Fake Drake but tens of thousands of other AI-generated tracks after receiving complaints from Universal Music.
The scammer, who used the handle mourningassasin, told Vice they hired someone to make “around nine” Ocean songs using “very high-quality vocal snippets” of the Thinkin Bout You singer’s voice. The user posted a clip from one of the fake tracks to a leaked-music forum and claims to have quickly convinced its users of its authenticity. “Instantly, I noticed everyone started to believe it,” mourningassasin said. The fact that Ocean hasn’t released a new album since 2016 and recently teased an upcoming follow-up to Blond may have added to the eagerness to believe the songs were real.
The scammer claims multiple people expressed interest in private messages, offering to “pay big money for it.” They reportedly fetched $3,000 to $4,000 for each song in mid to late April. The user has since been banned from the leaked-music forum, which may be having an existential crisis as AI-generated music makes it easier than ever to produce convincing knockoffs. “This situation has put a major dent in our server’s credibility, and will result in distrust from any new and unverified seller throughout these communities,” said the owner of a Discord server where the fake tracks gained traction.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/scammers-used-ai-generated-frank-ocean-songs-to-steal-thousands-of-dollars-222042845.html?src=rss
OpenAI may have lost more than half a billion dollars over the past year
Bungie Keeps Winning Lawsuits Against Destiny 2 Cheaters For Millions Of Dollars
Bungie has spent quite a bit of time and effort going after Destiny 2 cheat-makers, and it seems that the campaign is paying off. As first uncovered by Stephen Totilo of Axios, Bungie recently won a $6.7 million judgment against Lavicheats in a US district court.
As court documents read, roughly $5.5 million of that sum is for violations of the DMCA, $300,000 of it is for violations of the Copyright Act, about $600,000 is for violations of the Lanham Act, and the remaining $250,000 is for court fees and costs.
This was a default judgment, meaning that Lavicheats never responded to the suit. According to Totilo, the Lavicheats owner is believed to live in India, which may account for this. Earlier in May, it was announced that Bungie won a similar lawsuit against VeteranCheats, AKA Mihai Claudiu-Florentin, for just over $12 million dollars. This was also a default judgment. Back in February, it won a lawsuit against a cheat-seller called AimJunkies for $4.3 million.
Amazon CEO Says ‘Really Good’ AI Models Take ‘Billions of Dollars’ To Train
Through its Bedrock generative AI service, Amazon Web Services will offer access to its own first-party language models called Titan, as well as language models from startups AI21 and Google-backed Anthropic, and a model for turning text into images from startup Stability AI. One Titan model can generate text for blog posts, emails or other documents. The other can help with search and personalization. “Most companies want to use these large language models but the really good ones take billions of dollars to train and many years and most companies don’t want to go through that,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Thursday. “So what they want to do is they want to work off of a foundational model that’s big and great already and then have the ability to customize it for their own purposes. And that’s what Bedrock is.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cisco Systems Pulls Out of Russia, Destroys Millions of Dollars Worth of Equipment
As it became known, Cisco Systems decided to physically destroy spare parts, product demonstrations, equipment and even furniture. The value of the destroyed stock is estimated at [$23.42 million]. The company has also disposed of fixed assets worth [$12,600]. By the end of 2022, Cisco Systems had reduced its workforce by a factor of 12 to five employees. The company terminated contracts with the rest in mid-2022, paying them a total of [$2.4 million]. The TASS Russian News Agency first reported the news.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple Is Betting a Billion Dollars on Theatrical Releases
Everybody’s favorite streaming service—no, not ad-free Netflix—is gearing up to become the next great studio coming to a cinema near you. Sources familiar with Apple’s business plans have revealed to Bloomberg that the company is spending $1 billion on its foray into film.
Twitter is making millions of dollars from previously banned accounts, report says
Twitter is making millions of dollars from just a handful of some of its most infamous users, according to a new report. New research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) estimates that Twitter “will generate up to $19 million a year in advertising revenue” from just 10 accounts that were once banned from the platform.
The report looked at the current engagement with 10 accounts that were previously banned for “ for “publishing hateful content and dangerous conspiracies.” The accounts were reinstated after Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. The group includes a number of high-profile accounts associated with extremism and conspiracy theories, including those belonging to influencer Andrew Tate, Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin, prominent antivaxxer Robert Malone and the Gateway Pundit.
In order to estimate their reach and engagement, CCDH analyzed nearly 10,000 tweets from these accounts during a 47-day period in December and January. According to their analysis, “on an average day, tweets from the ten accounts received a combined total of 54 million impressions,” they write. “Projecting this average across 365 days, the accounts can be expected to reach nearly 20 billion impressions over the course of a year.”
In order to determine how much ad revenue those impressions might generate for Twitter, CCDH says it created three new Twitter accounts that followed only the 10 users named in the report. The authors found that ads appeared about once every 6.7 tweets. Then, using data from analytics firm Brandwatch, which estimates that “Twitter ads cost an average of $6.46 per 1,000 impressions,” CCDH came up with “a total figure of up to $19 million in estimated annual ad revenues across the accounts.”
While the estimates aren’t a precise accounting of how much Twitter might be making from these users, it demonstrates how valuable a small number of highly polarizing accounts can be for the platform. It also underscores how much more Twitter stands to gain by bringing back even more controversial users.
All of the accounts named in the report were once permanently banned from twitter, but were reinstated after Musk said he would offer “general amnesty” to users who hadn’t broken the law. Twitter also recently announced plans to allow even more previously banned users to appeal their suspensions.
At the same time, Twitter’s advertising business has taken a major hit since Musk’s takeover. A number of high profile advertisers have pulled back from the platform, and revenue is down as much as 40 percent, according to reporting fromPlatformer.
The report also points out several instances when ads from prominent advertisers appeared adjacent to offensive and inflammatory posts from these users. For example, a Prime Video ad directly underneath a tweet from Andrew Anglin that states “the only career a woman is actually capable of on merit is prostitution.” The report also highlights an ad from the NFL, which appeared directly underneath a tweet misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
“This work confirms that Twitter has been displaying ads next to every one of the toxic accounts we have investigated, despite the fact that the individuals behind them are known to promote hateful views and falsehoods,” CCDH writes.
After huge layoffs last week, Microsoft are now chucking billions of dollars into OpenAI
It’s only been a week since Microsoft announced they were laying off 10,000 human staff across their various divisions (including their games studios), but they’ve now revealed they’ll be investing billions of dollars into driving breakthroughs in AI. Microsoft will be pumping the money into futuristic tech firm OpenAI, which operates Turing-botherer chatbot ChatGPT and its artistic relative DALL-E. OpenAI’s already received two investments from Microsoft, one in 2019 and another in 2021. This third investment is intended to be “multi-year” and “multibillion dollar”, allowing both companies to “independently commercialize” whatever budding Skynets emerge.