“Researchers tracked cases where a user viewed the same article twice in quick succession — once triggering the paywall and once not — from what appeared to be the same user (based on IP address, user agent, and other signals) … The most common evasion method was switching to the browser’s private mode (82% of instances). Other ways, such as switching a browser or disabling JavaScript, were used too but less often.”

“Good actors tell me that they begin with the words — memorized, marked, and blocked — and spend weeks in rehearsal rearming those words with the right emotions, so that what the audience experiences is not the writer’s words but the character’s inner life, intermediated by the actor’s craft…Writers, when we take the stage, have the reverse task. We start with the emotions that shaped our stories — finding them, sometimes even memorizing them in order — and then search for the language that can make them new.”

“In a world where photos and videos can’t be taken at face value, we may not be able to count on technology alone to solve problems of its own creation…At a certain point, the burden on journalists becomes not only verifying that images are credible, but persuading people to care about reality.”

“Students are complaining on sites like Rate My Professors about their instructors’ overreliance on A.I. and scrutinizing course materials for words ChatGPT tends to overuse, like ‘crucial’ and ‘delve.’ In addition to calling out hypocrisy, they make a financial argument: They are paying, often quite a lot, to be taught by humans, not an algorithm that they, too, could consult for free.”

“Giant Bomb is now owned by the people who make Giant Bomb, and it would not have been possible without the speedy efforts of Fandom and our mutual agreement on what’s best for fans and creators”, a joint statement issued by new owners Jeff Bakalar and Jeff Grubb says. “The future of Giant Bomb is now in the hands of our supporting community, who have always had our backs no matter what. We’ll have a lot more to say about what this looks like soon, but for now, everyone can trust that all the support we receive goes directly to this team.”

“The U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) released $12 million after the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit administratively stayed an earlier decision by a divided three-judge panel of that court that had allowed USAGM to avoid complying with a district judge’s temporary restraining order requiring USAGM to pay RFE/RL its April funds. The move gives the full appeals court time to reconsider the three-judge panel’s reasoning.”

“An April 30 response [to a DOGE operative] from CPB’s executive vice president and general counsel Evan Slavitt reiterated the organization’s stance that federal law states that CPB ‘will not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government…Accordingly, neither DOGE, the GSA, nor any other component of the executive branch has any role supervising or having any activity relating to CPB.’”

“Three years after CNN’s parent company killed the hotly anticipated (and very expensive) CNN+ service shortly after it was released, the news network will introduce a new streaming product this fall that packages live and on-demand programming…the new service would be tied to the company’s recently introduced subscription product, which gives paying members unlimited access to articles posted on CNN.com.”

“The appointments of Blanche, Perkins, and Nieves are the result of furious lobbying over the weekend by the conservative content industry — as jealously protective of its copyrighted works as any other media companies — as well as populist Republican lawmakers and lawyers, all enraged that Silicon Valley had somehow persuaded Trump to fire someone who’d recently criticized AI companies. The populists were particularly rankled over Perlmutter’s removal from the helm of the Copyright Office, which happened the day after the agency released a pre-publication version of its report on the use of copyrighted material in training generative AI systems.”

“Broadly, the case raised questions about how much the public should know about negotiations that cost taxpayers money and shape public policy. The verdict comes at an important moment for the European Commission’s reputation for disclosure. [Ursula] von der Leyen began her second five-year term as leader of the commission, the bloc’s executive arm, late last year, and she has made standing up for core values like democracy and transparency key to her image.”

“In an attempt to undercut Hemphill’s credibility, Hansen caught [Kara] Swisher and [Om] Malik in the crossfire. He called Malik a ‘failed blogger’ with an axe to grind against Meta. He then suggested that Swisher, whom he referred to as a Vanity Fair columnist (she last wrote for the site in 2015), was similarly biased against the company. In court, he projected a headline about her recently calling Mark Zuckerberg a ‘small little creature with a shriveled soul.’”

“Individual works of art are protected by copyright, but visual styles, such as Studio Ghibli’s, are not. The legal logic here is that styles should be allowed to evolve through influence and reinterpretation by other artists. That creative and social process is how van Gogh led to Picasso, and Spenser to Shakespeare. But a deluge of people applying Ghibli’s style like an Instagram filter, without adding any genuine creative value, isn’t a collective effort to advance our visual culture.”

“The jury is out on whether AI systems can make good therapists, but this future is already legible. A lot of people are anecdotally pouring their secrets out to chatbots, sometimes in dedicated therapy apps, but often to big general-purpose platforms like Meta AI, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or xAI’s Grok. And unfortunately, this is starting to seem extraordinarily dangerous — for reasons that have little to do with what a chatbot is telling you, and everything to do with who else is peeking in.”