Creators Get Bigger Star Treatment Across Entertainment — and Brands Are Noticing
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At a time when traditional media companies are consolidating and scrambling to find growth, user-generated content and the creator space is seeing a surge of interest and investment. The creator economy — defined as everything from ads pulled in from YouTube content to merchandising and marketing partnerships — is expected to grow to $480 billion by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs. ...
“They’re modern media companies,” Jared Carneson, global head of social at Adobe, said. “They have circulation that rivals traditional media companies. They have more watch time and eyeballs on them than Hollywood blockbusters.”
To further that point, Khare noted that her content sits alongside traditional shows on the home pages of connected televisions, signaling that this content goes beyond something quick you watch on your phone. ...
“Creators are building businesses off of the products that are genuine to them. It’s not just selling themselves or the content they create but being able to find natural extensions of themselves as well,” Catanese explained. “That’s just a natural evolution in a capitalist economy.” ...
Nowhere is that acceptance more apparent than in the living room. In August, YouTube broke yet another Nielsen viewership record, beating The Walt Disney Company as the media distributor responsible for the most overall TV watch time. YouTube accounted for 13.4% of all TV usage during the month compared to Disney’s 9.4%. It’s now not uncommon to see the YouTube app living next to tiles for major streamers like Netflix, Hulu and Apple TV+. ...
The influencer economy has always required creators to wear multiple hats — talent, writer, editor and producer, just to name a few of the most common roles. But with the rise of AI tools, time-consuming tasks like sound clarification or adding in captions can be automated.
“It’s hard to master a single tool, never mind master a suite of tools, to be able to do all of that stuff effectively. It’s exciting to see AI coming in and helping close that gap,” Carneson said. ...
“There is no storytelling that isn’t human centered,” Carneson added. “AI is a great optimizer. It’s a great augmenter of things. But it is a tool.” ...
As for Khare, she likened AI’s potential impact on entertainment to the evolution of “Survivor.” The CBS reality show first premiered in 2000. Over the years, the camerawork and storytelling has evolved and become more sophisticated, but the main conceit of the show has never changed. ...
See the full story here: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/creators-bigger-star-treatment-across-200000825.html
RSL: A New AI Licensing Standard
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Yesterday, a coalition of major publishers (including Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, and Quora) announced their support for Really Simple Licensing (RSL), a new open standard that lets web publishers set machine-readable licensing terms for AI crawlers. ...
RSL builds on the familiar robots.txt protocol, but instead of just saying yes or no to crawlers, publishers can now embed licensing terms directly into their files. Want to charge per crawl? Set a subscription fee? Demand payment every time an AI model references your content in a response? RSL supports all these models.
The technical implementation looks straightforward. Publishers add XML-based licensing terms to their robots.txt files. ...
Unfortunately, RSL by itself cannot block bots from visiting websites. The standard relies entirely on AI companies voluntarily respecting the licensing terms they encounter. Given that AI model builders have repeatedly been accused of ignoring robots.txt files, expecting them to suddenly honor payment requirements seems optimistic.
The RSL Collective has partnered with Fastly to provide enforcement capabilities. Fastly acts as “the bouncer at the door,” checking whether AI crawlers have agreed to license content before granting access. However, this only works for publishers using Fastly’s content delivery network. Everyone else can ask for payment but has no mechanism to enforce compliance. ...
Cloudflare took a different approach. Since July 2025, the company blocks AI crawlers by default for all new domains. More than one million customers have enabled AI crawler blocking since the feature launched. ...
The RSL Collective’s success hinges entirely on achieving critical mass. ...
See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/09/rsl-a-new-ai-licensing-standard/
United Arab Emirates Joins U.S. and China in Giving Away A.I. Technology
In a move that shows the growing influence of the United Arab Emirates in the global artificial intelligence race, a new research lab backed by the Persian Gulf nation said on Tuesday that it was freely sharing an A.I. model meant to compete with systems released by companies in the United States and China. ...
Now the new Emirati lab, the Institute of Foundation Models, has released its first open source model, K2 Think. The lab said the system performed on a par with the leading open source technologies from OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek, according to standard benchmarks. ...
The university is led by Dr. Xing, a Chinese-born American researcher who was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. He and the Emirati university recently opened satellite offices in Paris and Silicon Valley. ...
Like DeepSeek, which demonstrated its success early this year, the lab aims to show that powerful technologies can be built without access to the enormous amounts of computer hardware amassed by the likes of OpenAI and Google. ...
K2 Think is a “reasoning model” that can spend time “thinking” through complex problems before settling on an answer. ...
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/technology/uae-emirates-ai-open-source.html
Tech bros hate this college student. California should listen to what she’s saying about artificial intelligence
Columnist https://www.latimes.com/people/anita-chabria
... “Whatever long-term future AI creates, whether that’s positive or negative, it’s [my generation] that’s going to experience that,” she told me. “We’re going to inherit the impacts of the technology we’re building today.”
This week, California will make a big decision about that future, as legislators vote on Senate Bill 53. ...
The bill is a basic transparency measure and applies only to the big-gun developers of “frontier” AI models — these are the underlying, generic AI creatures that may later be honed into a specific purpose, like controlling our nuclear weapons, curing cancer or writing term papers for cheating students.
But right now, companies are just seeing how smart and powerful they can make them, leaving any concerns about what they will actually do for the future — and for people like Revanur, whose lives will be shaped by them.
If passed, the law would require these developers to have safety and security protocols and make them public. ...
Big Tech has lobbied full force against the bill (and has been successful in watering it down some). Enter Revanur and the AI safety organization she started when she was 15: Encode. ...
Revanur and her group have gone from being dismissed with a “who are you, you’re nothing” attitude from lawmakers to having “an equal seat at the table” with the clouty tech bros and their billions, Tratten said. And they’ve done it through sheer persistence (though they are not the only advocacy group working on the bill). ...
See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2025-09-08/chabria-monday-politics-newsletter-ai-artificial-intelligence-sb-53
How the AI Boom Is Leaving Consultants Behind
... Clients quickly encountered a mismatch between the pitch and what consultants could actually deliver. They found that consultants, who often had no more expertise on AI than they did internally, struggled to deploy use cases that created real business value. ...
Consultants vs. the ‘kid in college’
Advisory heavyweights—including Big Four accounting firms Deloitte, PwC, KPMG and Ernst & Young and pure consulting firms McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group—for years have helped enterprises get up to speed on technologies like the cloud and perform vital but unsexy tech implementations, like enterprise resource planning systems.
That expertise hasn’t translated into a playbook for deploying something as cutting edge as generative AI in the enterprise at scale, tech leaders said. ...
“If I were to go hire a consultant to help me figure out how to use Gemini CLI or Claude Code, you’re going to find a partner at one of the Big Four has no more or less experience than a kid in college who tried to use it,” he said, referring to generative AI tools from Google and Anthropic. ...
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-ai-boom-is-leaving-consultants-behind-c9088fda
China Is Suddenly Deploying AI Everywhere
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Last week, the Chinese State Council unveiled its ten-year plan to fully integrate AI into every aspect of the country's economy by 2035. Called "AI+," the ambitious plan sees AI becoming a "key growth engine for the country's economic development," a transformation mirroring that of the internet age.
...While the US has all but bet the farm on the success of AI, Chinese tech firms like DeepSeek have changed the game by using significantly less resources. ...
While US tech companies do eke out some practical AI software, they do so under the eye of a handful of the most powerful tech monopolies on the face of the Earth. ...
In China, meanwhile, that kind of state backing is reserved for companies working on pragmatic uses for AI. ...
"They [China] see highly impactful AI applications not as something to theorize about in the future but as something to take advantage of here and now," Julian Gewirtz, a former security official with the Biden administration told the WSJ.
Nowhere is this more apparent than Xiong’an, China's "city of the future." Located in the outer-Beijing province of Hebei, Xiong’an is a new city planned from the ground up around the integration of 5G, AI, autonomous driving, and renewable energy. ...
See the full story here: https://futurism.com/china-ai-deepseek-everywhere
Werner Herzog On 6K Restoration Of His Classic ‘Cave Of Forgotten Dreams’: “It Looks Incredibly Crisp And… Beautiful”
Very, very few people have been allowed into the Chauvet cave in Southeastern France since it was discovered in 1994 and found to contain ancient cave paintings dating back more than 30,000 years. Fortunately, one of those admitted was filmmaker Werner Herzog, who was granted permission to bring small cameras into the subterranean limestone system to make a documentary. From that footage, shot in 3D, he made his astonishing Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
Fifteen years after the release of that film, it is getting a 6K restoration that brings it to viewers for the first time in full resolution.
“It looks incredibly crisp and has a beautiful sense of depth,” Herzog tells Deadline. “It’s just almost like watching, not a new film, but the film with different eyes.” ...
Some of the animals are painted with eight legs. Torches held by ancient hands would have given the tableau the illusion of movement. ...
Orson Welles’ Lost Movie Will Use AI to Reconstruct Missing 43 Minutes
Amazon-backed firm Showrunner, led by Edward Saatchi, is using the film as a test case for how Hollywood can overhaul production. The results won't be commercialized — the tech giant hasn't obtained rights from Warner Bros. or Concord. ...
Showrunner, which plans to reconstruct the destroyed 43 minutes of Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons. ...
The effort won’t be commercialized because Showrunner hasn’t obtained the rights to the film from Warner Bros. Discovery or Concord. If they “see a marketplace for it and a path for it outside of an academic context, then of course they have ownership of it,” Saatchi says. “The goal isn’t to commercialize the 43 minutes, but to see them exist in the world after 80 years of people asking ‘might this have been the best film ever made in its original form?’” ...
The Magnificent Ambersons was filmed in 1941 at RKO’s Gower Street Studios, now Sunset Gower Studios, in Los Angeles. The original cut was 131 minutes long, but Welles had conceded the right to the final cut. And once RKO took over editing, it deleted almost a third of the negatives for the film without the director’s approval to free vault space. That footage was never found. ...
“There was, for example, a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy,” Rose said in a statement. “The camera moves from one end of a ballroom and then back up the other end [while] you have about a dozen different characters walk in and out of frame, and crisscrossing subplots. It was really ahead of its time. Yet all but about the last 50 seconds of the shot was cut.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/orson-welles-lost-movie-ai-1236361881/
Disney’s First VP Role to Lead AI Collaboration With Humans
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Now, Disney has posted a job advertisement for a Vice President of Collaboration and AI role.
This role will be based in Burbank, California and focuses on making different departments work together on AI projects rather than hiring more technical specialists. ...
The successful candidate must “ensure alignment with Disney’s global vision and corporate strategies,” Disney says, particularly across the company’s entertainment empire, which spans film studios, theme parks, streaming services and merchandise operations.
These requirements point to coordination problems that many companies face but rarely address directly. ...
See the full story here: https://aimagazine.com/news/disneys-first-vp-role-to-lead-ai-collaboration-with-humans
Apple’s Vision Pro Gaining Traction in Some Niches of Business
Too pricey for most consumers, the $3,500 mixed-reality headset may have found a calling in narrow and deep business applications such as helping train pilots or designing kitchens.
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-vision-pro-gaining-traction-in-some-niches-of-business-16d3c74e
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