By KELVIN CHAN and MATT O’BRIEN

LONDON (AP) — Getty Images is facing off against artificial intelligence company Stability AI in a London courtroom for the first major copyright trial of the generative AI industry.

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™.

The New York Times inked a multi-year deal with Amazon last month to license its content to Amazon’s artificial intelligence models.

Amazon will have access to The New York Times’ content, including NYT Cooking and its sports publication, The Athletic.

Amazon’s AI services, such as Alexa, will produce real-time summaries and short excerpts. Similar to other news publishers, The New York Times views a licensing deal as a viable way to generate profits as AI companies attempt to siphon copyrighted content to train their chatbots.

Attitudes towards AI use, especially regarding news organizations, can be polarizing. Other publishers such as The Washington Post, Associated Press, and Axios have also signed deals with AI companies to license their content. A few years ago, AI companies were using copyrighted material without permission. Media company Ziff Davis and The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging intellectual theft.

The Times’s decision to do business with an AI company feels like a departure from its initial thoughts on AI; the biggest difference is that the publication is being paid for its intellectual property. The majority of the litigation against OpenAI and other AI companies stems from allegations that they fail to properly credit the source of their information.

There are several reasons to be wary about AI, including its environmental impact, the potential for spreading misinformation, and its potential to alter the way we work. Artificial intelligence isn’t disappearing anytime soon though. It’s better for news organizations to be compensated for their work rather than allowing AI companies to continue scraping their content for free. It creates a chain of accountability and forces these companies to pay.

When a consumer uses AI to ask a question, chatbots provide the user with answers sourced from various news articles, making it less likely for the user to scroll through the publisher’s website to find the answer themselves. This licensing deal balances the scales between artificial intelligence and news publishers that are struggling to increase traffic and assures them a cut of the profits.

More artists and publishers should take note of this. OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and more are resistant to effective AI legislation because they don’t want to compensate people for their intellectual property. These deals could be a first step in artists demanding their own deals, not only to protect their art but also to ensure that these companies aren’t hoarding all the profits they make from their work.

We can’t allow them to train AI with our content for free. If AI companies wish to use our work, they need to pay us for it.

NEW YORK—Warner Bros. Discovery today unveiled its plans to separate the company into two publicly traded companies—one focused on its streaming services and the second on its cable business, confirming plans it announced last December.

The “Streaming & Studios” company will consist of Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, DC Studios, HBO and HBO Max, as well as their film and television libraries. Global Networks will include entertainment, sports and news television brands worldwide, including CNN, TNT Sports in the U.S., and Discovery, top free-to-air channels across Europe, and digital products such as Discovery+ streaming service and Bleacher Report (B/R).

BingX, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange and Web3 AI firm, has unveiled Chelsea FC’s 2025/26 training kit as part of its ongoing partnership with the Premier League club. This latest release reinforces the brand’s position as the Official Men’s Training Kit Partner. The training kit boasts a sleek design that calls attention to the Chelse FC’s high performance ethos.

The BingX x Chelsea FC campaign is titled ‘Trained on Greatness.’ The initiative draws parallels between the disciplined preparation of elite athletes and the data-driven precision of AI-powered trading. To achieve this, the campaign emphasizes the core values of focus, adaptability, and performance optimization. A dynamic launch video and refreshed visual identity underscore this synergy, positioning both entities as leaders in their respective fields — sports and fintech.

Image Credit: BingX x Chelsea FC

By MICHELLE CHAPMAN, AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Warner Bros. Discovery will calve off cable operations from its streaming service, creating two independent companies as the number of people “cutting the cord” brings with it a sustained upheaval in the entertainment industry.

HBO, and HBO Max, as well as Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, DC Studios, will become part of the streaming and studios company, Warner Bros. said Monday.

The cable company will include CNN, TNT Sports in the U.S., and Discovery, top free-to-air channels across Europe, and digital products such as the Discovery+ streaming service and Bleacher Report.

Shares jumped 11% at the opening bell.

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav will become serve as CEO of the company that for right now is called Streaming & Studios. Gunnar Wiedenfels, chief financial officer of Warner Bros. Discovery, will be CEO of the cable-focused entity, for now known as Global Networks.

“By operating as two distinct and optimized companies in the future, we are empowering these iconic brands with the sharper focus and strategic flexibility they need to compete most effectively in today’s evolving media landscape,” Zaslav said in a statement.

Just days ago Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders in a vote that was symbolic as it’s nonbinding, rejected the 2024 pay packages of some executives, including Zaslav, who will make more than $51 million.

Warner Bros. Discovery said in December that it was implementing a restructuring plan in which Warner Bros. Discovery would become the parent company for two operating divisions, Global Linear Networks and Streaming & Studios. That was seen as a preview of the separation announced Monday.

From hydration to ovulation, health trackers keep tabs on nearly 1 in 4 Americans. But wearable devices like these are just one piece of the ever-expanding medical “internet of things” — a universe of internet-enabled devices, applications, wearables, and more that collect, share, and analyze our data.

UC San Francisco Associate Professor of Medicine Sandeep Kishore, MD, PhD, MSc, is part of a joint UCSF and UC Berkeley team preparing to pilot wearable devices to help treat some people with diabetes and high blood pressure at UCSF. We asked him about wearable health technology and what the future holds for these ubiquitous gadgets.

How is wearable technology already intersecting with our lives?

Many people are likely to think about fitness trackers that count your steps, monitor your heart rate, and even take your blood oxygen level. But there are also smartphones. You can think about a pharmacy or a message from your health care team on MyChart. That’s all a form of mobile health.

One of my favorite examples is sensors, think about blood pressure cuffs or continuous glucose monitors that connect to your phone and provide the data instantly. If you’re unfamiliar with glucose monitors, these are little patches with a very tiny needle that usually go on the upper arm and can sample your blood sugar levels about every five minutes.

We are working here at UCSF to find new ways that the information can be relayed to your health care team and be made actionable.

How could wearable technology fill a health care data gap?

As physicians, we often only get a snapshot of what’s happening for a patient, like when we take your blood pressure at a clinic visit. It’s surprisingly difficult to get accurate blood pressure readings in a clinic.

Patients may have just had their morning coffee and taken the stairs, or they might be a little anxious — all of these can temporarily increase your blood pressure reading at the doctor’s office. It’s what we call, “white coat hypertension.”

Wearables, like electronic blood pressure cuffs, could record your blood pressure 365 days a year, sending the data to a secure system that could give your physician a real window into your blood pressure over time, not just at six-month check-ups.

Where do you see the future of wearable health technology in five years?

• Wearable tech has to get easier for patients: Finding ways to, for instance, use a smartphone one day to take your blood pressure through your camera phone or, in the future, check your heart rate via a Zoom video recording, capture my attention because they don’t take much effort.
• Digital twins: We might one day be able to build a “digital twin” of patients — a computer model of their health that gives their care team an additional tool. It’s still early, and I haven’t yet seen it clinically validated, but I’m intrigued by that in the next five years,
• It’ll be the bouquet, not the flowers: It’s an idea I learned from UCSF Professor of Medicine Ida Sim, PhD, MD. You can imagine a number of gadgets focused on just one condition. This is going to lead to data overload, and, as a physician, more data than I’m going to know what to do with. Pulling these data streams — the flowers — together into a bouquet, to make it useful, simple, and scalable is going to be the secret sauce.

What are the challenges to all this data?

The sheer volume is huge. Each patient can generate gigabytes of data per month, which is a data processing challenge.

The other issue is with aggregation and standards. Different devices track data differently. Companies have proprietary algorithms behind the data, which they sometimes lock, so harmonizing and combining data to make sense of it will be a challenge.

Could artificial intelligence deal with this deluge of data?

Yes. Artificial intelligence has the potential to sift through the firehose of data to detect new patterns in diseases. Those patterns could help us understand what’s behind symptoms or even what’s driving disease. It may also help us predict the risk of certain conditions. The goal would be to turn all that data into clinically actionable alerts and interventions. At UCSF, we’re working to find ways data from wearable technologies can be relayed to your health care team to help them support you and, together, make better decisions about your health.

What would this look like in real life?

I think about a patient I had on the wards recently. She was in her 30s and had type 1 diabetes, meaning that she requires frequent insulin to manage her blood sugar. Unfortunately, she ran out of insulin and presented to the hospital nearly comatose.

In many ways, she was hidden. Her roommate was the one who found her slouched in her room. If my patient had some sort of passive blood sugar monitoring, we could envision a day when that data could be part of a feedback loop between her and her health care team. Imagine if it sent an alert to a physician or a pharmacist monitoring a dashboard? Or maybe initiated a call or text to her phone that — if she didn’t respond — would trigger an emergency response? Maybe, we could have prevented this from happening.

Will AI replace doctors?

No. Clinical insight is still very essential. It’s not the case, in my mind, that a data scientist or an AI expert alone can take a bunch of data and generate a clinical insight without any clinical experience. To build tools, you’re going to need cross-functional teams with developers, clinicians, patients, UX, designers, etc.

How is UCSF charting the future of big data as it relates to health care?

UCSF and UC Berkeley are working together to bring wearables into the clinic. We’ve partnered to build an open-source platform called JupyterHealth to bring health data and AI together for diabetes and high blood pressure, some of the most common conditions. The platform uses AI models to surface key insights for clinicians and patients in near real time to help manage these conditions better. Our goal is to leverage this unprecedented level of data to help clinicians and patients make decisions now that otherwise might have taken months to years with typical monitoring.

How does UCSF ensure that the AI solutions it designs and studies are safe, secure, and ethical?

UCSF has a rigorous system of checks and balances that starts long before any study does. As a physician-scientist researching AI, I have first-hand experience with this process. We have a new Health AI Oversight Committee of experts that reviews the projects to ensure the AI we produce and study is trustworthy, and that it’s secure, fair, and protects people’s privacy.

Researcher must submit detailed research plans to our institutional review board. This expert committee must sign off on any research that might impact or involve human participants to ensure that research is conducted safely and ethically.