OpenAI and Microsoft are funding projects to bring more AI tools into the newsroom. The duo will give grants of up to 10 million to Chicago Public Media, the Minnesota Star Tribune, Newsday (in Long Island, NY), The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Seattle Times. Each of the publications will hire a two-year AI fellow to develop projects for implementing the technology and improving business sustainability. Three more outlets are expected to receive fellowship grants in a second round. OpenAI and Microsoft are each contributing 2.5 million in direct funding as well as 2.5 million in software and enterprise credits.

Some of the biggest names in Hollywood, literature and music have issued a warning to the artificial intelligence industry. The Washington Post reports that more than 10,500 artists have signed an open protest letter objecting to AI developers' "unlicensed use" of artists' work to train their models. "The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted," the one sentence letter reads. The letter has support from some huge names across the film, television, music and publishing industries. Some of the more famous signatures include actors Julianne Moore, Rosario Dawson, Kevin Bacon and F. Murray Abraham, as well as former Saturday Night Live star Kate McKinnon, author James Patterson and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke.

The night after their son Mats died aged just 25, Trude and Robert Steen sat on the sofa in their living room in Oslo with their daughter Mia. "Everything was a blur," remembers Trude of that day 10 years ago. "Then Robert said, 'Maybe we should reach out to Mats' friends in World of Warcraft.'" Mats was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a progressive condition that causes the muscles to weaken gradually. He was diagnosed aged four and started using a wheelchair at 10.

Today in TechScape I'm deciphering Elon Musk's global political goals, a remarkable documentary filmed within World of Warcraft, polling on support for school phone bans, and cats on TikTok. Thank you for joining me. First, let's talk about Musk's global politics. Over the weekend, Musk pledged to give away 1m a day to registered voters in battleground states in the US who sign his Pac's petition in support of the first and second amendments. He awarded the first prize, a novelty check the size of a kitchen island, at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday and the second on Sunday in Pittsburgh.

When Elon Musk introduced Tesla's robotaxi, the Cybercab, earlier this month, he showed a slide during his presentation that probably looked familiar to Blade Runner 2049 fans. It featured the back of a person wearing a trench coat against a desert-like landscape with high-rise buildings in the background. According to The New York Times, Alcon Entertainment accused him of using "AI-created images mirroring scenes from Blade Runner 2049, including one featuring a Ryan Gosling look-alike." It said that it previously denied a request by Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery to use imagery from the film as part of the Cybercab event. The companies were also named as defendants in the lawsuit. Alcon called Tesla's use of AI to create images nearly identical to scenes from the movie an "intentionally malicious gambit."

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is to introduce facial recognition technology to try and crack down on scammers who fraudulently use celebrities in adverts. Elon Musk and personal finance expert, Martin Lewis, are among those to fall victim to such scams, which typically promote investment schemes and crypto-currencies. Mr Lewis previously told the Today programme, on BBC Radio 4, that he receives "countless" reports of his name and face being used in such scams every day, and had been left feeling "sick" by them. Meta already uses an ad review system which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect fake celebrity endorsements but is now seeking to beef it up with facial recognition tech. It will work by comparing images from ads flagged as being dubious with celebrities' Facebook or Instagram profile photos.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has never attempted to hide the science-fiction influences which inspire his companies. But now, Musk's enthusiasm for film has landed him in hot water as the maker of Blade Runner 2049 sues the billionaire tech boss over Tesla's Robotaxi images. During the'We, Robot' event on October 10, Musk showed a stylised image bearing a striking resemblance to one of Ryan Gosling's key scenes from the movie. However, Alcon Entertainment, the film's production company, says it had explicitly refused a request to use stills from the film during the launch of Tesla's self-driving Robotaxi. The company alleges that Tesla used an AI-powered image generator to create fake promotional imagery based on scenes from Blade Runner 2049.

The Wall Street Journal's parent company, Dow Jones, and the New York Post are suing AI-powered search startup Perplexity for using their content to train its large language models. "This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce," the publishers wrote in their complaint, according to the Journal. They cited an instance wherein the service allegedly served up the entirety of a New York Post piece when the user typed in "Can you provide the fultext of that article." In addition, the publications are accusing Perplexity of harming their brand by citing information that never appeared on their websites. The company's AI can hallucinate, they explained, and add incorrect details.

The "financial magnitude of the misappropriation here was substantial," the lawsuit said. "Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk's massively amplified, highly politicised, capricious and arbitrary behaviour, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account," it added. Alcon also accused the event organisers of "false endorsement" by suggesting a connection between the production company and Tesla. Warner Bros, which hosted the robotaxi launch event at one of its movie studios, was also the distributor of Blade Runner 2049 when it was released in 2017. The highly-anticipated sequel to the 1982 cyberpunk classic Blade Runner, starred Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas and Jared Leto, and won two Academy Awards.

Recent MIDI-to-audio synthesis methods have employed deep neural networks to successfully generate high-quality and expressive instrumental tracks. However, these methods require MIDI annotations for supervised training, limiting the diversity of the output audio in terms of instrument timbres, and expression styles. We propose CoSaRef, a MIDI-to-audio synthesis method that can be developed without MIDI-audio paired datasets. CoSaRef first performs concatenative synthesis based on MIDI inputs and then refines the resulting audio into realistic tracks using a diffusion-based deep generative model trained on audio-only datasets. This approach enhances the diversity of audio timbres and expression styles. It also allows for control over the output timbre based on audio sample selection, similar to traditional functions in digital audio workstations. Experiments show that while inherently capable of generating general tracks with high control over timbre, CoSaRef can also perform comparably to conventional methods in generating realistic audio.