You always seem interested in Salesforce news, Dear Reader. We’ll test that by reporting that the company will partner cloud services giant Alibaba to sell its systems in China. This will presumably require acquiescing to Chinese data privacy and surveillance rules. Perhaps a bit of a moral quandary but this is the same Salesforce that ignored objections to working with the current U.S. regime’s immigration agency.

We also have an interesting collaboration between Catalina Marketing and LiveRamp. Marketers will be able to use Catalina audience segments through the LiveRamp Data Store, making it easier to optimize ad campaigns against 85 million households. It’s another escape route from the walled gardens.

Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike.  Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else.  Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed.  It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.