There’s no shortage of lawsuits by publishers against genAI platforms for copyright infringement; now major studios are getting with the program. Walt Disney and Comcast’s Universal are accusing Midjourney of using some of their best known characters (think Darth Vader and the Minions) in its AI image generator — a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” they say. No response yet from Midjourney.
Sending loud signals that its ambitions exceed delivering your dinner, DoorDash has spent $175 million to buy retail media platform Symbiosys to boost its off-site advertising capabilities. Advertisers, from enterprise CPG leaders to local restaurants, utilize DoorDash in an attempt to reach high intent customers. That reach will now be expanded across search, social, and off-site display.
The Minions are great, but when it comes to truly valuable data, nothing beats live humans. Salesforce-owned Slack is reinforcing the point by blocking other firms from searching or storing Slack messages. The company cites customer privacy, although some observers suspect the real purpose is denying data to AI rivals.
The web search tool Perplexity looks like it’s taking on Google with its latest release, a web browser named Comet. Comet claims to move “from browsing to thinking,” surfacing information and search results in response to natural language queries. Comet is available immediately to Perplexity Max subscribers; others can join a wait list.