Artists, designers, photographers, authors, actors and musicians see little humour left in jokes about AI programs that will one day do their job for less money. That dark dawn is here, they say. Vast amounts of imaginative output, work made by people in the kind of jobs once assumed to be protected from the threat of technology, have already been captured from the web, to be adapted, merged and anonymised by algorithms for commercial use. But just as GPT-4, the enhanced version of the AI generative text engine, was proudly unveiled last week, artists, writers and regulators have started to fight back in earnest. "Picture libraries are being scraped for content and huge datasets being amassed right now," says Isabelle Doran, head of the Association of Photographers.

Google routinely fields product queries from millions of shoppers. Now, it wants to take a cut of their purchases, too. Under a new program, retailers can list their products on Google Search, as well as on the Google Express shopping service and Google Assistant. In exchange for Google listings and linking to retailer loyalty programs, the retailers pay Google a piece of each purchase, which is different from payments that retailers make to place ads on Google platforms. A new Google initiative called'Shopping Actions,' should help retailers fend off Amazon's growing dominance.