 |
|
|
|||||
Fans are continuing to change the tune of how they consume music. It was recently reported that MTV was going to stop broadcasting five channels, including MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV, and MTV Live in the United Kingdom, and that the channels would go dark the end of this year. (Its flagship channel, MTV HD, will continue to air reality series.) Local news outlets in Australia, Poland, France, and Brazil have also reported that MTV could shut down music channels in those respective countries as wellleaving some to wonder if the United States is next to shutter those channels. Its no secret that MTVs parent company, Paramount Global, has been going through a lot of changes and turbulence, especially after the FCC officially approved the $8.4 billion Paramount-Skydance merger. But even before the merger was finalized, MTV was already undergoing plenty of changes in recent years. In 2023, it was announced that MTV News, the news production arm of MTV in the United States, would shut down in 2023, with the corresponding website officially shuttering last summer. The initial move resulted in Paramount laying off 25% of its staff at the time. The latest decision to cease broadcasting music channels in the U.K. continues to highlight the global shift in how consumers today are discovering and consuming music videos, and other music-related content like news, on social media and platforms like TikTok and YouTube, rather than broadcast TV or traditional media outlets. The rise of MusicTok According to Vevos new Fandom = Cultural Currency report, 44% of fans search for related content on social media. Meanwhile, according to a MIDiA Research Consumer Survey from this year, the top music discovery method for 16-to-24-year-olds is TikTok, followed by YouTube, streaming, and social media. And a joint TikTok and Luminate report that came out earlier this year found that TikTok has been a key driver of music discovery, monetization, and chart success. The same research found that U.S. TikTok users are 74% more likely to discover and share new music on social and short-form video (SFV) platforms than the average user of these platforms. Popular chart-topping artists like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan have all gone viral on TikTok, and have utilized social media as a way to reach their fans. Meanwhile, TikTok has been leaning into its throne as a newly emerged platform for music discovery and consumption through marketing campaigns like See Where Music Takes You, which launched this summer. TikTok has also launched several new features over the past few years to help make discovering music easier for its users, including the Add to Music App feature, which was previously launched in partnership with major music streaming services like Amazon Music and Spotify. The feature allows users to save songs they find on the app to the music streaming platform of their choice. However, despite MTV closing down its music channels in other parts of the worldand fans wondering if the U.S. would be nextThe Wall Street Journal recently reported that newly appointed Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison supposedly has plans up his sleeve to revive and reinvent MTV as a music channel in the U.S. If the news ends up being true, one has to wonder how successful those plans will be, given all the data and headlines pointing to music shifting away from cable TVunless, of course, social media will play a part in promoting the channel. Paramount and MTV did not respond to a request for comment.
Category:
E-Commerce
Americas largest brick-and-mortar retailer is partnering with the countrys most prominent AI firm in the clearest signal yet that companies are hoping to boost their sales with artificial intelligence-assisted shopping tools. Today, Walmart and OpenAI announced a new partnership that will allow ChatGPT users to buy Walmart products directly from within the chatbot itself. Heres what you need to know about the news, and how Walmarts stock price is reacting. The Walmart-OpenAI deal explained Today, retail giant Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT) announced a major new deal with ChatGPT maker OpenAI. The deal will see the artificial intelligence firms chatbot gain the ability to make purchases through Walmart and Sams Club on a customers and members behalf. This AI shopping experience will be done through natural language interaction with ChatGPT. In other words, you tell ChatGPT what you want to buy from Walmart or Sams Club, and ChatGPT will add the item to your cart, and your preferred payment method will be chargedall without leaving the ChatGPT interface. This type of shopping, which is referred to as agentic commerce due to it being powered by a generative AI chatbot, utilizes OpenAIs Instant Checkout and Agentic Commerce Protocol, which the company launched last month. This marks the next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesnt just help you find what to buy, it also helps you buy it, OpenAI said when introducing Instant Checkout in September. Walmarts adoption of OpenAIs technology underscores how the largest retailers on the planet are betting that consumers will increasingly turn to AI chatbots to help fulfill their shopping needs. When can Walmart shoppers start using ChatGPT? Despite announcing the OpenAI deal today, Walmart did not give a date for when users could begin shopping through their normal ChatGPT conversations, only saying that the deal would allow this interaction soon. The company also wasnt shy about making promises about how transformative agentic commerce will befor shoppers and artificial intelligence itself. At the center of this transformation are the everyday moments that define how people shop, the company said. This is agentic commerce in action: where AI shifts from reactive to proactive, from static to dynamic. It learns, plans, and predicts, helping customers anticipate their needs before they do. The ushering in of the intention economy? While AI adherents and ChatGPT junkies may be excited about the possibilities of agentic commerce, the expanding role of the technology also risks speeding the arrival of the so-called “intention economy.” As University of Cambridge researchers have warned, our interactions with AI chatbots could be used to manipulate us into doing things we otherwise wouldnt have intended to do. In an intention economy, the researchers wrote in a December 2024 paper titled Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models, an LLM could, at low cost, leverage a users cadence, politics, vocabulary, age, gender, preferences for sycophancy, and so on, in concert with brokered bids, to maximize the likelihood of achieving a given aim (e.g., to sell a film ticket). Chatbots with aegentic commerce capabilities could conceivably use your innocuous conversations with them to steer you into buying products without you fully realizing this subtle manipulation. You sound a bit down, a chatbot might say, after you reveal to it that youve been unhappy with your work and social life. A run can boost your endorphins, but just make sure you have appropriate running shoes because I know youve had knee problems before. Theres a great deal on the latest Nikes in your size at your preferred retailer. Would you like me to order them for you? Whether agentic commerce reaches this level of dystopia or not remains to be seen. However, if you are buying things through chatbots, its a good idea to be vigilant that your purchase decisions come from you and not the chatbot itself. WMT shares spike on news of ChatGPT shopping integration However AI hawks and critics might view Walmart’s partnership with OpenAI, investors appear to be cheering the news. Immediately after Walmart announced the deal, WMT shares spiked around 3% in premarket trading to above $105 per share. As of the time of this writing, WMT shares were up 2.98% in early Tuesday trading. Todays OpenAI deal isnt the first between the AI giant and Walmart. Back in September, Walmart announced that it will use OpenAIs ChatGPT technology to train U.S. frontline and office-based workers beginning in 2026.
Category:
E-Commerce
The top prize in landscape architecture has just been awarded to Mexican designer Mario Schjetnan, a multifaceted landscape architect whose work has transformed parks across Mexico City and vastly expanded social housing projects across his home coountry. Schjetnan and his firm, Grupo de Diseo Urbano (GDU), were announced winners of the 2025 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, a biennial award from the Cultural Landscape Foundation recognizing the most influential and impactful practitioners in the field. Chapultepec Forest and Park, Mexico City [Photo: Francisco Gomez Sosa/courtesy Grupo de Diseo Urbano and the Cultural Landscape Foundation] Schjetnan and GDU have designed some of the most significant parks in Mexico, including Chapultepec Forest and Park, the second-largest city park in Latin America, known colloquially as Mexico’s “Central Park.” With a focus on equitable access to nature, the application of environmental knowledge, and the potential of postindustrial sites, GDU’s work has expanded the notion of what parks can do in Mexico. The Oberlander Prize jury’s citation calls Schjetnan “a strong voice for social engagement and environmental justice in tandem with the art of landscape architecture.” Chapultepec Forest and Park, Mexico City [Photo: Francisco Gomez Sosa/courtesy Grupo de Diseo Urbano and the Cultural Landscape Foundation] The Oberlander Prize includes a $100,000 award and two years of public engagement activities focused on the laureate’s work. Schjetnan is the third designer to win the prize. Landscape architect Julie Bargmann, whose D.I.R.T. Studio focuses on degraded sites, was the inaugural laureate in 2021. Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, known for his work designing “sponge cities, was honored in 2023. (Yu died in an airplane crash on September 23, 2025, in Brazil.) Bicentennial Park Nature Garden, Mexico City [Photo: Francisco Gomez Sosa/courtesy Grupo de Diseo Urbano and the Cultural Landscape Foundation] GDU’s best work Schjetnan cofounded GDU in 1977 after five years helping lead a vast worker housing program for the Mexican government that created more than 100,000 units of affordable housing across the country. GDU’s work built on that social focus, emphasizing access to natural areas and the use of natural systems to repair damaged spaces in and around urban areas. “The major question of my life is to improve liveability in the poorest sections of Mexico and Latin America, to provide social justice and urban equity, and also in the richest sections,” he said. Xochimilco Ecological Park, Mexico City [Photo: Francisco Gomez Sosa/courtesy Grupo de Diseo Urbano and the Cultural Landscape Foundation] Another of Schjetnan and GDU’s most notable projects is the 684-acre Xochimilco Ecological Park in Mexico City, a nature preserve and recreational space that’s part of a famed lagoon area recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Schjetnan’s U.S. projects include a waterfront park in Oakland, California; an interpretive landscape focused on immigrant workers located in Sonoma, California; and a linear park along a creek in San Antonio. GDU has also built projects across Latin America and the Middle East. Union Point Park, Oakland, California [Photo: courtesy PGA Design] In awarding Schjetnan the Oberlander Prize, the Cultural Landscape Foundation is celebrating an approach to landscape architecture that bleeds across design disciplines to create longer-lasting change in the lives of urban dwellers. San Pedro Creek Cultural Park, San Antonio [Photo: Francisco Gomez Sosa courtesy Grupo de Diseo Urbano and the Cultural Landscape Foundation] “For more than 50 years, Mario Schjetnan’s unwavering commitment to the idea of a human right to have access to open space and the necessity for incorporating cultural values in his work have served as foundational requirements in shaping and managing an equitable built environment for all,” said Charles Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation.
Category:
E-Commerce
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday vetoed landmark legislation that would have restricted children’s access to AI chatbots.The bill would have banned companies from making AI chatbots available to anyone under 18 years old unless the businesses could ensure the technology couldn’t engage in sexual conversations or encourage self-harm.“While I strongly support the author’s goal of establishing necessary safeguards for the safe use of AI by minors, (the bill) imposes such broad restrictions on the use of conversational AI tools that it may unintentionally lead to a total ban on the use of these products by minors,” Newsom said.The veto came hours after he signed a law requiring platforms to remind users they are interacting with a chatbot and not a human. The notification would pop up every three hours for users who are minors. Companies will also have to maintain a protocol to prevent self-harm content and refer users to crisis service providers if they expressed suicidal ideation.Newsom, who has four children under 18, said California has a responsibility to protect kids and teens who are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for everything from help with homework to emotional support and personal advice.California is among several states that tried this year to address concerns surrounding chatbots used by kids for companionship. Safety concerns around the technology exploded following reports and lawsuits saying chatbots made by Meta, OpenAI and others engaged with young users in highly sexualized conversations and, in some cases, coached them to take their own lives.The two measures were among a slew of AI bills introduced by California lawmakers this year to rein in the homegrown industry that is rapidly evolving with little oversight. Tech companies and their coalitions, in response, spent at least $2.5 million in the first six months of the session lobbying against the measures, according to advocacy group Tech Oversight California. Tech companies and leaders in recent months also announced they are launching pro-AI super PACs to fight state and federal oversight.The youth AI chatbot ban would have applied to generative AI systems that simulate “humanlike relationship” with users by retaining their personal information and asking unprompted emotional questions. It would have allowed the state attorney general to seek a civil penalty of $25,000 per violation.James Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, said Newsom’s veto of the bill was “deeply disappointing.”“This legislation is desperately needed to protect children and teens from dangerous and even deadly AI companion chatbots,” he said.But the tech industry argued that the bill was so broad that it would stifle innovation and take away useful tools for children, such as AI tutoring systems and programs that could detect early signs of dyslexia.Steyer also said the notification law didn’t go far enough, saying it “provides minimal protections for children and families.”“This legislation was heavily watered down after major Big Tech industry pressure,” he said, calling it “basically a Nothing Burger.”But OpenAI praised Newsom’s signing of the law.“By setting clear guardrails, California is helping shape a more responsible approach to AI development and deployment across the country,” spokesperson Jamie Radice said.California Attorney General Rob Bonta in September told OpenAI he has “serious concerns” with its flagship chatbot, OpenAI, for children and teens. The Federal Trade Commission also launched an inquiry last month into several AI companies about the potential risks for children when they use chatbots as companions.Research by a watchdog group says chatbots have been shown to give kids dangerous advice about topics such as drugs, alcohol and eating disorders. The mother of a teenage boy in Florida who died by suicide after developing what she described as an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship with a chatbot has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Character.AI. And the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine recently sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging that ChatGPT coached the California boy in planning and taking his own life earlier this year.OpenAI and Meta last month announced changes to how their chatbots respond to teenagers asking questions about suicide or showing signs of mental and emotional distress.Meta said it is now blocking its chatbots from talking with teens about self-harm, suicide, disordered eating and inappropriate romantic conversations, and instead directs them to expert resources. Meta already offers parental controls on teen accounts.OpenAI said it is rolling out new controls enabling parents to link their accounts to their teen’s account. EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. Trān Nguyn, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
SpaceX launched another of its mammoth Starship rockets on a test flight Monday, successfully making it halfway around the world while releasing mock satellites like last time.Starship the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built thundered into the evening sky from the southern tip of Texas. The booster peeled away and made a controlled entry into the Gulf of Mexico as planned, with the spacecraft skimming space before descending into the Indian Ocean. Nothing was recovered.“Hey, welcome back to Earth, Starship,” SpaceX’s Dan Huot announced as employees cheered. “What a day.”It was the 11th test flight for a full-scale Starship, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk intends to use to send people to Mars. NASA’s need is more immediate. The space agency cannot land astronauts on the moon by decade’s end without the 403-foot (123-meter) Starship, the reusable vehicle meant to get them from lunar orbit down to the surface and back up.Instead of remaining inside Launch Control as usual, Musk said that for the first time he was going outside to watch “much more visceral.”The previous test flight in August a success after a string of explosive failures followed a similar path with similar goals. More maneuvering was built in this time, especially for the spacecraft. SpaceX conducted a series of tests during the spacecraft’s entry over the Indian Ocean as practice for future landings back at the launch site.Like before, Starship carried up eight mock satellites mimicking SpaceX’s Starlinks. The entire flight lasted just over an hour, originating from Starbase near the Mexican border.NASA’s acting administrator Sean Duffy praised Starship’s progress. “Another major step toward landing Americans on the moon’s south pole,” he said via X.SpaceX is modifying its Cape Canaveral launch sites to accommodate Starships, in addition to the much smaller Falcon rockets used to transport astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station for NASA. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Marcia Dunn, AP Aerospace Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
Sites : [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] next »