Interest in nuclear power is up, but don’t look at the receipts. At the 2023 World Climate Action Summit, 25 countries, including the United States, pledged to triple nuclear energy production by 2050 in order to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But few states or utility companies risk investing in new nuclear projects, because the costs are too damn high. (View Highlight)
Spotify has been flooded with AI-generated music. Dubious record labels have been uploading hundreds of fabricated albums en masse to the streaming platform this fall, Ars Technica reported, including some that ended up on real artists’ pages. In many cases, those albums are still up, and there’s no easy way for users or musicians to report the fakes. Who is listening to those fakes? It’s not just unsuspecting listeners who get served the albums via the algorithm. Bots are now listening to bot-created music, which distorts what gets recommended to human listeners and diverts royalty payments from the artists they mimic. All this AI slop further erodes the user experience of Spotify. (View Highlight)
Glenn McDonald, a former Spotify data analyst, told Ars Technica that it’s hard to get rich off streaming fraud because of paltry per-stream royalties. So the only way to make a decent buck is to flood the platform. Breaking free of the algorithm altogether may be the only alternative to actually discovering new music sans bots (and to stop getting repeatedly served the same Sabrina Carpenter song). (View Highlight)
