It's no secret that Spotify is the dominant player in the music streaming market, with 293 million paid subscribers and 761 million monthly active users across both paid and free tiers. Along with massive market dominance has come a fair bit of controversy in recent years. As the biggest music-streaming platform, Spotify is usually the first mentioned in the discussion about whether artists are fairly compensated for their work. The math around that question is obvious -- buying a digital album outright typically costs between 10 and 15 depending on where you buy it, while a Spotify Premium subscription costs 13 a month in the US. Fair pay is far from the only drama surrounding Spotify, though.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Say More Creator Hub Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Versus Switch Off Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Spotify will now tell you when an artist isn't real The new AI Persona badge will flag synthetic artist identities and keep their music out of recommendations by default. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan. She also runs Fan Mail, a weekly pop-culture newsletter.

AI-generated artists will be labelled as an'AI persona' on their profile, in search and in track listings. AI-generated artists will be labelled as an'AI persona' on their profile, in search and in track listings. Music streaming platform creates'AI persona' label that will appear on profiles and track listings in crackdown on fake performers Spotify is to label AI artists and exclude them from algorithm recommendations as part of a crackdown on fake performers. The world's largest music streaming platform is creating a label for AI-generated artist identities called "AI personas" that will appear on the artist profile and on track listings on playlists. It means that from next month AI-generated artists such as the Velvet Sundown will carry the persona label and will be blocked from personalised recommendations by default.

Models (LLMs) and build personalized LLMs tailored for various applications. While fine-tuning seems to be a direct solution, it requires substantial computational resources and may significantly affect the utility of the original LLM.

This research investigates the use of customized GPT models to enhance prompting proficiency among architecture students when generating AI-driven images. Prompt engineering is increasingly essential in architectural education due to the widespread adoption of generative AI tools. This study utilized a mixed-methods experimental design involving architecture students divided into three distinct groups: a control group receiving no structured support, a second group provided with structured prompting guides, and a third group supported by both structured guides and interactive AI personas. Students engaged in reverse engineering tasks, first guessing provided image prompts and then generating their own prompts, aiming to boost critical thinking and prompting skills. Variables examined included time spent prompting, word count, prompt similarity, and concreteness. Quantitative analysis involved correlation assessments between these variables and a one-way ANOVA to evaluate differences across groups. While several correlations showed meaningful relationships, not all were statistically significant. ANOVA results indicated statistically significant improvements in word count, similarity, and concreteness, especially in the group supported by AI personas and structured prompting guides. Qualitative feedback complemented these findings, revealing enhanced confidence and critical thinking skills in students. These results suggest tailored GPT interactions substantially improve students' ability to communicate architectural concepts clearly and effectively.

American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on "college protesters," "radicalized" political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications that 404 Media obtained via public records requests. This article is copublished in partnership with 404 Media. Massive Blue, the New York–based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an "AI-powered force multiplier for public safety" that "deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels." According to a presentation obtained by 404 Media, Massive Blue is offering cops these virtual personas that can be deployed across the internet with the express purpose of interacting with suspects over text messages and social media. The technology--which as of last summer had not led to any known arrests--demonstrates the types of social media monitoring and undercover tools private companies are pitching to police and border agents.

This study introduces GreenIQ, an AI-powered deep search platform designed to revolutionise carbon market intelligence through autonomous analysis and automated report generation. Carbon markets operate across diverse regulatory landscapes, generating vast amounts of heterogeneous data from policy documents, industry reports, academic literature, and real-time trading platforms. Traditional research approaches remain labour-intensive, slow, and difficult to scale. GreenIQ addresses these limitations through a multi-agent architecture powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), integrating five specialised AI agents: a Main Researcher Agent for intelligent information retrieval, a Report Writing Agent for structured synthesis, a Final Reviewer Agent for accuracy verification, a Data Visualisation Agent for enhanced interpretability, and a Translator Agent for multilingual adaptation. The system achieves seamless integration of structured and unstructured information with AI-driven citation verification, ensuring high transparency and reliability. GreenIQ delivers a 99.2\% reduction in processing time and a 99.7\% cost reduction compared to traditional research methodologies. A novel AI persona-based evaluation framework involving 16 domain-specific AI personas highlights its superior cross-jurisdictional analytical capabilities and regulatory insight generation. GreenIQ sets new standards in AI-driven research synthesis, policy analysis, and sustainability finance by streamlining carbon market research. It offers an efficient and scalable framework for environmental and financial intelligence, enabling more accurate, timely, and cost-effective decision-making in complex regulatory landscapes

Meta has nuked a bunch of its AI-generated profiles from Facebook Instagram, the company confirmed, after the AI characters prompted widespread outrage and ridicule from users on social media. The AI-generated profiles, which were labeled as "AI managed by Meta," launched in September of 2023, rolling out alongside the company's celebrity-branded AI chatbots ( also discontinued). Meta doesn't seem to have updated any of these profiles for several months, and the pages seem to have been largely unnoticed until this week, following an interview published by the Financial Times with Meta's VP of Generative AI, Connor Hayes. In the interview, Hayes spoke about the company's goal to eventually fill its services with AI-generated profiles that can interact with people and function "kind of in the same way that accounts do." Those comments brought attention to the extant fMeta-created AI profiles and, well, users were not exactly impressed with what they found.

Drew Crecente's daughter died in 2006, killed by an ex-boyfriend in Austin, Texas, when she was just 18. Her murder was highly publicized--so much so that Drew would still occasionally see Google alerts for her name, Jennifer Ann Crecente. The alert Drew received a few weeks ago wasn't the same as the others. It was for an AI chatbot, created in Jennifer's image and likeness, on the buzzy, Google-backed platform Character.AI. Jennifer's internet presence, Drew Crecente learned, had been used to create a "friendly AI character" that posed, falsely, as a "video game journalist."