Good Morning,
The AI fight is quietly becoming an AI negotiation. BMG is the first major rightsholder since Warner to license its catalog to Suno (Music Business Worldwide) — which moves the question from whether AI companies get the music to what they pay for it.
The more revealing experiments are onstage. At the Edinburgh Fringe, stand-ups are using AI as both material and scene partner (The New York Times); comedy is a brutal test bed, because people either laugh or it don’t. And a Mother Jones writer commissioned a novel from Claude, coming away less struck by the prose than by what the exercise exposed about authorship (Mother Jones).
Then Washington. The Kennedy Center board voted to restore Trump’s name to the building, with an inscription crediting him for renovation that hasn’t happened (?) (The New York Times). Meanwhile the Post documents the year’s damage to the National Symphony: donations 25 percent short of expectations even as the orchestra cut costs (Washington Post).
In Salzburg, two-thirds of a 320-figure Mozart installation has vanished (AP). Somebody out there is putting together a very odd collection.
All of today’s stories below.
