There is a battle gripping the music business today around the manipulation of streaming services – and innocent indie artists are the collateral damage. Fraudsters are flooding Spotify, Apple Music and the rest with AI-generated tracks, to try and hoover up the royalties generated by people listening to them. These tracks are cheap, quick and easy to make, with Deezer estimating in April that over 20,000 fully AI-created tracks – that's 18% of new tracks – were being ingested into its platform daily, almost double the number in January. The fraudsters often then use bots, AI or humans to endlessly listen to these fake songs and generate revenue, while others are exploiting upload services to get fake songs put on real artists' pages and siphon off royalties that way. Spotify fines the worst offenders and says it puts "significant engineering resources and research into detecting, mitigating, and removing artificial streaming activity", while Apple Music claims "less than 1% of all streams are manipulated" on its service.

This week, I'm wondering what my first jobs in journalism would have been like had generative AI been around. In other news: Elon Musk leaves a trail of chaos, and influencers are selling the text they fed to AI to make art. Generative artificial intelligence may eliminate the job you got with your diploma still in hand, say executives who offered grim assessments of the entry-level job market last week in multiple forums. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, which makes the multifunctional AI model Claude, told Axios last week that he believes that AI could cut half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and send overall unemployment rocketing to 20% within the next five years. One explanation why an AI company CEO might make such a dire prediction is to hype the capabilities of his product.

Snowflake kicked off its annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2025, on Tuesday. The cloud-based data-storage company launched a slew of new features. The biggest highlight was agentic AI solutions that help organizations better make sense of their data: Snowflake Intelligence and Data Science Agent. With the rise of agentic AI, Snowflake is the latest company to embrace the burgeoning technology to optimize how companies sort, analyze, and understand their data. AI chatbots have risen in popularity because they make it easy to find what you are looking for using a simple, conversational text prompt.

Data is the fuel behind the AI revolution -- the foundational building block for the new technological world order. But data is immaterial, difficult to organize, and subject to an ever-growing mountain of walled gardens and regulatory decrees. Businesses seeking to harness AI, therefore, often struggle to make the most of their data, this most vital of resources. At its annual Snowflake Summit user conference, the company announced the release of Openflow, a new service designed to integrate businesses' data into a single, unified, and intelligible channel. Like disparate streams flowing into a single river, Openflow takes the whole of a company's data -- structured, unstructured, batch, and streaming -- and collects them in such a way that they can be more easily visualized and leveraged.

Looking to skip the hassle of wall-mounting a security camera in your backyard and wiring it for power? If you have an available outdoor light socket, this new Wyze cam and smart bulb combo can be screwed right into it. Available now, the Wyze Blub Cam ( 49.98) is pretty much what it says: a smart bulb with an integrated security camera. Screw-in security cameras are plentiful on Amazon, but they typically come from no-name brands and (generally speaking) offer only iffy quality. But we're starting to see light socket-compatible cams from more reputable companies, including a recent 2K model from Lorex, and now we have Wyze's entry in the market.

Ukraine managed to not only humiliate the Kremlin by boasting of taking out more than a third of all Russian missile carriers in a spectacular drone attack but also to rewrite the rules of modern warfare, analysts say. Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, Kyiv used inexpensive drones at the weekend to destroy Russian nuclear-capable bombers worth billions of dollars in an operation carried out after months of planning. "Spider's Web" dealt a blow to Russia more than three years after its invasion of Ukraine, and the operation will now be studied closely by militaries around the world as a new strategy in asymmetric warfare.

Two weeks ago, we launched Power Hungry, a new series shining a light on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial intelligence revolution. It raised some worrying issues, not least the incredible energy demands of AI video generation. But there are also reasons to be hopeful: innovations that could improve the efficiency of the software behind AI models, the computer chips those models run on, and the data centers where those chips hum around the clock. Here's what you need to know about how energy use, and therefore carbon emissions, could be cut across all three of those domains, plus an added argument for cautious optimism: the underlying business realities may ultimately bend toward more energy-efficient AI. In each issue of our print magazine, we ask a member of staff to tell us about three things they're loving at the moment. For our latest edition, which was all about creativity, we asked our China reporter Caiwei Chen to give us an insight into her life.

NICE, a leading provider of contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions, today announced its new branding. The company has rebranded to NiCE, and one of the many factors driving this rebranding is emphasizing'intelligence' (a hallmark of AI) in customer conversations, with'i' marked in lower caps to stand out. During an exclusive analyst meeting, the company's leadership team also announced that the new brand will emphasize the human touch. Also: OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be your'super assistant' - what that means The emphasis on human touch is noteworthy because the company wants to reposition itself from being a leading CCaaS provider to an AI company under the leadership of new CEO, Scott Russell. Given that shift, the reference and emphasis on human touch are particularly important.

REMEMBER THAT? – Treasury secretary reminds CBS host of past remarks over tariff inflation concerns. UNDER FIRE AGAIN – New Karen Read text scandal emerges -- and it's not the one from last year. ONGOING INVESTIGATION – 'King of the Hill' voice actor killed in shooting. CRACK IN THE FOUNDATION – Fight over lumber tariffs could reshape future of US home building. SOUNDING THE ALARM – Experts warn of America's risk to drone attack after Ukraine blasts Russian installations.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said: "Veo 3 has proved hugely popular since its launch. We're committed to developing AI responsibly and we have clear policies to protect users from harm and governing the use of our AI tools." Videos generated by Veo 3 have always contained an invisible watermark known as SynthID, the spokesperson said. Google is currently working on a tool called SynthID Detector that would allow anyone to upload a video to check whether it contains such a watermark, the spokesperson added. However, this tool is not yet publicly available.