multimillonarios

The music mogul has been celebrated as a transformative force in hip-hop, but fallout from new accusations of abuse has impacted some business relationships and his legacy.

The long-term impact of the suits, of course, remains to be seen. Since the heightened scrutiny brought by the

MeToo

movement half a decade ago, some prominent men like Johnny Depp returned to performing after fighting accusations of sexual misconduct. Another music industry executive, Russell Simmons, continues to have many supporters despite having faced serious allegations of misconduct, which he denied. But Mr. Combs may not have the same level of good will, said Ms. Hampton, the filmmaker.

“Puff already had a pretty dark legacy,” she said.

On an episode of the popular hip-hop podcast “New Rory & Mal,” recorded after the settlement in Ms. Ventura’s case, but before the other two cases were filed, commentators balked at the idea that the music industry would reject Mr. Combs in a significant way. “Everyone is going to move on like it didn’t happen,” said Rory Farrell, one of the podcast’s hosts.

But his co-host, Jamil Clay, saw the accusations against Mr. Combs as a potential turning point for an industry that has often been sheepish when it comes to addressing misconduct allegations against some of its brightest stars, urging the business to put aside any fear of economic losses and deal with the accusations against Mr. Combs head-on.

“Enough is enough — let’s stop trying to avoid it and sidestep it and act like we didn’t hear that or see that documentary or hear these people allege that they were raped,” Mr. Clay said on the episode. “Let’s address it.”

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot.

Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public,” the new Google policy says. “For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.”

Fortunately for history fans, Google maintains a history of changes to its terms of service. The new language amends an existing policy, spelling out new ways your online musings might be used for the tech giant’s AI tools work.

Previously, Google said the data would be used “for language models,” rather than “AI models,” and where the older policy just mentioned Google Translate, Bard and Cloud AI now make an appearance.

This is an unusual clause for a privacy policy. Typically, these policies describe ways that a business uses the information that you post on the company’s own services. Here, it seems Google reserves the right to harvest and harness data posted on any part of the public web, as if the whole internet is the company’s own AI playground. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The practice raises new and interesting privacy questions. People generally understand that public posts are public. But today, you need a new mental model of what it means to write something online. It’s no longer a question of who can see the information, but how it could be used. There’s a good chance that Bard and ChatGPT ingested your long forgotten blog posts or 15-year-old restaurant reviews. As you read this, the chatbots could be regurgitating some humonculoid version of your words in ways that are impossible to predict and difficult to understand.

One of the less obvious complications of the post ChatGPT world is the question of where data-hungry chatbots sourced their information. Companies including Google and OpenAI scraped vast portions of the internet to fuel their robot habits. It’s not at all clear that this is legal, and the next few years will see the courts wrestle with copyright questions that would have seemed like science fiction a few years ago. In the meantime, the phenomenon already affects consumers in some unexpected ways.

The overlords at Twitter and Reddit feel particularly aggrieved about the AI issue, and made controversial changes to lockdown their platforms. Both companies turned off free access to their API’s which allowed anyone who pleased to download large quantities of posts. Ostensibly, that’s meant to protect the social media sites from other companies harvesting their intellectual property, but it’s had other consequences.

Twitter and Reddit’s API changes broke third-party tools that many people used to access those sites. For a minute, it even seemed Twitter was going to force public entities such as weather, transit, and emergency services to pay if they wanted to Tweet, a move that the company walked back after a hailstorm of criticism.

Lately, web scraping is Elon Musk’s favorite boogieman. Musk blamed a number of recent Twitter disasters on the company’s need to stop others from pulling data off his site, even when the issues seem unrelated. Over the weekend, Twitter limited the number of tweets users were allowed to look at per day, rendering the service almost unusable. Musk said it was a necessary response to “data scraping” and “system manipulation.” However, most IT experts agreed the rate limiting was more likely a crisis response to technical problems born of mismanagement, incompetence, or both. Twitter did not answer Gizmodo’s questions on the subject.

On Reddit, the effect of API changes was particularly noisy. Reddit is essentially run by unpaid moderators who keep the forums healthy. Mods of large subreddits tend to rely on third-party tools for their work, tools that are built on now inaccessible APIs. That sparked a mass protest, where moderators essentially shut Reddit down. Though the controversy is still playing out, it’s likely to have permanent consequences as spurned moderators hang up their hats.

The billionaire announced the "temporary measure" to address extreme levels of data scraping on the site.

Initial limits were quickly increased by Mr Musk at the weekend.

While many users reported no longer seeing limits on Sunday, some said a "rate limit exceeded" notification had returned on Monday.

Mr Musk - who took over Twitter in October 2022 had said previously that he was not happy about artificial intelligence (AI) firms using Twitter's data to train their large language models.

Changes to the platform at the weekend saw it impose an initial 600-tweet limit for unverified Twitter users who are not paying for a subscription to the platform, but Mr Musk said this had increased to 1,000 on Saturday evening.

He has not yet provided an update on whether the limits will remain in place.

An AI issue?

Responding to a user flagging issues with site features, Mr Musk said in a tweet on Saturday morning Twitter had imposed the measures as a result of "EXTREME levels of data scraping".

The process is a key method of gathering content and information from web platforms, and involves extracting data from sites, often at great scale, to make it accessible and readable in local formats, such as in a spreadsheet.

"Almost every company doing AI, from start-ups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data," Mr Musk added in his tweet.

"It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup's outrageous valuation."

Similar concerns over the mass use of platform data to train AI models in part sparked Reddit's decision to make companies pay to access its data.

Average Retirement Savings By Age: Are You Normal?

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Data scientist and ex-Twitter employee, Dr Rumman Chowdhury, told the BBC it was unclear if AI organisations had been scraping data from Twitter, but suggested financial issues could be behind the changes.

"Frankly, I think I'm in a majority of people who believe that it's due to his lack of payment of his bills... and he's attempting to reduce his costs," she said.

An Australian project management firm has filed a lawsuit against Twitter in a US court seeking cumulative payments of about A$1m (£534,000) over alleged non-payment of bills for work done in four countries, court filings show.

In May, a former public relations firm filed a suit in a New York court saying Twitter had not paid its bills, while early this year US-based advisory firm Innisfree M&A Inc sued it, seeking about $1.9m (£1.4m) for what it said were unpaid bills after it advised Twitter on its acquisition by Mr Musk.

Since Mr Musk bought Twitter he has focused on reducing costs by laying off half the workforce and introducing the subscription service, which offers the sought-after "verified" badge for a monthly fee.

For a platform that requires engagement, limiting posts seems to go in the opposite direction. It is a "very extreme and unprecedented tactic" which is "already failing", said Dr Chowdhury.

Twitter saw advertisers flee amid worries about Mr Musk's approach to content moderation rules, affecting its revenue.

When Mr Musk spoke to the BBC in April, he said the company was now "roughly breaking even", claiming most of its advertisers were returning.

Impact on the ground

The limit on tweets saw some journalists, who use Twitter to find information for live reporting and verification of stories, confronted with the curbs.

Bel Trew, chief international correspondent for The Independent, tweeted that limits to how many tweets she could read on the platform had left her at a "complete loss" while reporting on Sunday.

And a reporter in the US city of Baltimore was left unable to view tweets from the local police department's Twitter account in the wake of a shooting that left two people killed and a further 28 injured.

https://twitter.com/justin_fenton/status/1675472735927955457

Those receiving "rate limit exceeded" notifications found these applied across all accounts - including to accounts which tweet real-time information about emergencies, weather hazards and natural disasters.

https://twitter.com/BenjaminGoggin/status/1675224462558371843

The BBC reached out to Twitter for clarification and received an automated message of a poo emoji.

An AI issue?

Impact on the ground

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