What You Looking At, Chief?; Copycat Cases

Apartment The smell of success

The drama about the publisher’s director’s department has been making headlines lately.

Both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have had high-profile incidents in which their billionaire owners weighed in (or overruled, actually) editorial decisions. WaPo has too he allegedly fought hire top journalism talent partly because of this lack of independence.

But when they’re not busy, top executives are a lucrative audience.

As The New York Times reports, top publishers including The Wall Street Journal, Axios, Semafor and Fortune have recently launched newsletters and membership programs targeting C-suite executives and business leaders at important organizations.

To be fair, this type of information product is often a response to sponsor requests as much as editorial value. If PwC or Deloitte are willing to sponsor such a package, a hungry news company puts it together.

The WSJ’s current CEO membership program has 675 members who pay about $25,000 a year, according to the Times. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

“You have an entire professional class that feels more overwhelmed and confused than ever, and they have the resources to pay for content or contact — events — that they find educational,” says Axios CEO Jim VandeHei.

Understandable, right?

Per Wiredthere are 27 different active lawsuits against various AI content generation companies.

The most frequently named defendants are OpenAI (with eight lawsuits), Microsoft (with five), and Anthropic (with three).

Most cases revolve around large language models, both in terms of the material used to train them and their ability to reproduce existing material when asked. However, some visual artists claim similar actions have been taken by text-to-image generators, and several lawsuits have been filed on behalf of voice actors who claim their voices were cloned without their consent.

It’s worth nothing that many of these lawsuits have been filed by publishers — mostly news publications and music studios — but more have been filed on behalf of groups representing individual creators, including high-profile authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates and George RR Martin.

However, so far none of these cases are even close to trial. Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence may be the closest, and it is in an indefinite grace period.

Still, it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. court system has to decide how generative AI companies are—or aren’t—responsible for copyright infringement.

Agents of Chaos

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, speaking last week at BG2 podcastwhich covers open source software, had words for, well, all of business SaaS.

For example, he predicts that SaaS applications and enterprise applications are likely to “all fail in the agent era.”

By the “agent era,” Nadella is referring to a near future in which embedded generative AI agents perform software and analytics duties for the company.

“All [business] logic will be at the level of artificial intelligence, so to speak,” he claims. And at that point, “people will start changing their backends.” Which is to say, their SaaS vendors and point solutions.

“As we speak,” he says, Microsoft Dynamics, a business software company, “is seeing pretty high win rates on [backend accounts].” This is thanks to custom, built-in integrations with OpenAI, in which Microsoft is a large minority shareholder.

2024 was a a difficult year for SaaS companies – and it’s getting harder.

“We’re going to go pretty aggressively to try to collapse all of that,” Nadella says of SaaS middlemen, citing customer service technology, CRM services and business financial operations software.

But wait! There’s more!

Creative marketing is expanding beyond social media as more brands embrace the use of creative influencers in programmatic. [Digiday]

Google plans to add an AI search mode option. [The Information]

The ICO, Britain’s data protection regulator, calls Google “irresponsible” for practices that allow advertisers to track users’ digital “fingerprints”. [The Guardian]

Spindl: How to really do on-chain attribution. [blog]

How RE/MAX plans to build a retail business with media advertising. [Ad Age]

Snapchat was named in a recent lawsuit for its role in the distribution and sale of fentanyl-laced drugs. [Bloomberg]

You are employed

Digital ad platform Infillion adds Collin Korab and Jeff Zito as vice president and senior vice president of client partnerships, respectively. [release]

Publicis hires Amazon CEO Amy Armstrong as CRO. [Ad Age]