The web has been filling up with writing nobody particularly asked for. On the other hand, the things people actually paid for all had a body attached.
Pew found that more than a third of web pages published since ChatGPT’s launch show signs of machine authorship (TechCrunch), while traffic to the ten largest US news sites has dropped by a third in two years (Press Gazette). MIT researchers showed why attribution is so hard to recover: at sufficient scale, you can pull every image by a given artist out of the training data and the output doesn’t change (MIT News). Google shipped a detector for AI fakes (Nieman Lab) the same week Harvard closed its writing center (The Atlantic). We’re building verification tools faster than we’re teaching how to make art.
Now the receipts. A filmed Hadestown extended from five nights to four weeks and grossed $20.7 million at the movie box office (IndieWire); Ragtime set a Lincoln Center Theater box office record (Deadline).
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
