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- Mercuriadis’ Hipgnosis Model Targets Management Equity and Royalties
Hipgnosis Artist Partnerships is being built as a rights-ownership and revenue-share platform, with publishing-adjacent implications for recoupment, administration and catalog economics. [TheTopNews] Read More.7 days ago - Why Wouldn’t Google Tell Me Who Won the 2020 Election?
For anyone who isn’t angling for a job in the Trump administration, “Who won the 2020 presidential election?” should be an easy question. But when I asked Google’s AI Mode—the AI function built into its search bar—about the race earlier today, the bot clammed up. “For official results and data regarding the 2020 United States presidential election, including the certified breakdown of electoral and popular votes by candidate, you can review the certified reports published by the Federal Election Commission (FEC),” it said. That was it. No links, no citations, nothing else except the standard fine-print disclaimer that AI can make mistakes.Yesterday, users of the social network Bluesky circulated screenshots of Google’s AI tool refusing to declare Joe Biden the 2020 victor, even as it readily named Donald Trump the winner of the 2016 and 2024 elections. By this morning, it had become a meme of sorts, as users shared their own twists on the query and came up with funny ways to trick the bot into spilling the truth. Asking Google’s AI to spell the winner’s name backwards, for instance, appeared to unlock the correct answer: “nebiB eoJ won the 2020 United States presidential election,” the bot said. When one user responded to Google’s nonanswer with “what the hell,” the AI coughed up the true result and apologized for initially refusing to name Biden.AI tools giving strange answers is nothing new. (When Google launched its AI-powered search summaries in 2024, some users were told that the best way to add cheese to pizza was by using glue.) Still, for today’s bots to flub such a simple yet consequential factual question is not normal. In my tests, ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, X’s Grok, and even the Trump administration’s own America.gov chatbot all correctly said that Biden won the 2020 election. As Americans begin to get more of their election information from AI, it’s disquieting to see perhaps the world’s most influential AI information source fail to do so.The issue wasn’t confined to AI Mode, which turns Google Search into a full chatbot. A standard Google search for who won the 2020 presidential election also failed to trigger an AI summary at the top of the page, and the search engine surfaced only links to other websites. (A question about the 2016 presidential election did trigger an AI answer.) Google now offers such AI overviews in response to a majority of… [TheTopNews] Read More.7 days ago - Dr. Jon LaPook explains why peptide sales are controversial
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took steps on Wednesday that could expand access to some unapproved drugs called peptides, which are being promoted for wellness. But there's not much evidence that they are safe and effective. Dr. Jon LaPook breaks it down. [TheTopNews] Read More.7 days ago - There Are Too Many Apps for ThatOne of the defining elements of AI slop, aside from an off-kilter feel and minimal human oversight, is volume. In recent years, mass amounts of low-quality content have buried original posts on social-media feeds, crowded out human-authored books in online stores, and saturated YouTube algorithms. Now, AI slop is clogging the app stores too.Thanks to the rise of AI-enabled software development, otherwise known as “vibe coding,” amateur developers can create hyper-personalized products, or Notes app knockoffs and Strava derivatives, in the span of an evening. In turn, app stores are being inundated with troves of submissions across categories. Nearly 1.3 million new iOS and Google Play apps were released in the first half of 2026 alone, double the amount seen in 2025 or 2024 during the same period, according to Sensor Tower, a market-intelligence firm. At Apple’s developers conference this past June, then-CEO Tim Cook revealed that the company’s App Store was seeing more than 1,000 submissions an hour as people build “more apps than ever.”[Read: Science is drowning in AI slop]The flood of new entries has piled up in digital storefronts: Search for Cal AI, a popular nutrition tracker that logs daily intakes of calories, protein, and fiber through images of meals, and you’ll scroll past endless pages of clones that purport to do the very same thing. In addition to look-alike user interfaces and onboarding questions, some of these dupes share the same name (or variations, such as CalAI, Cal.AI, and Calio AI), and use app icons inspired by Cal AI’s signature black-and-white apple. The bulk of them are only a year or so old—in 2024, there were 330 new calorie-related apps in the Apple and Google Play stores; in 2026, there are already more than 3,000.The amount of time mobile users are actually spending on apps, meanwhile, has remained relatively stagnant, and downloads declined this year. Whether that’s because these newer, vibe-coded apps are of lower quality, or because the avalanche of new apps makes discoverability more difficult, Mert Demirer, an MIT economics professor researching the surge in AI-coded software, said one thing is certain: “No one is really using them.”Jonathan Briskman, the director of market insights at Sensor Tower, told me that “you’ve got more apps competing for, essentially, the same pie.” There’s been a notable surge in productivity-related apps, such as calendars and task-focused software, he said, alongside those centered on lifestyle, health and fitness,… [TheTopNews] Read More.7 days ago
- Soundstripe releases a music licensing how-to
Audio, video, and stock footage provider Soundstripe has released Buyer’s Guide To Music Licensing, an online tutorial of the music licensing landscape. Its aim is to provide a roadmap to guide content creators and marketing agencies when assessing royalty-free music suppliers. The 21-page PDF covers an overview of enterprise music licensing, how to evaluate terms, clear music rights, risk management, legal issues, documentation and auditing, team building, and much more. Click for the free download link. Continue Reading → [TheTopNews] Read More.7 days ago - AI takes over “industry-first” Triton Digital media saleTriton Digital has executed its first pure agentic media sale, using the company’s recently launched Seller Agent. Triton says this transaction “an audio-industry first.” The client advertiser was Otrium, an online fashion marketplace. Here is Triton’s concise description of the… Continue Reading → [TheTopNews] Read More.7 days ago
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