Ingrid Andress talks with Glamour about the viral National Anthem performance:
In 2024, country star Ingrid Andress made a mistake: She sang the national anthem at a televised baseball game, and did it drunk. The internet was ruthless in that very particular way that seems to be reserved for successful young women in the public eye. Now, the 33-year-old—happy, peaceful, and working on new music—reflects on the lead-up, the fallout, and the future.
Gibson — the guitar brand behind the iconic cherry red ES-345 Michael J. Fox wielded in the movie — announced that it’s on the hunt for the guitar, with the company sharing a callout Tuesday asking for anyone who may have details on its location to reach out with tips. “Have You Seen This Guitar?” Gibson’s poster reads, accompanied by a still from the movie of Fox playing the instrument. The search — and if all goes the way Gibson would like, the re-discovery — will be featured in an upcoming documentary the company is producing called Lost to the Future.
Lucas Shaw, writing for Bloomberg:
Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment are pushing to collect license fees for their work and also receive a small amount of equity in Suno and Udio, two leaders among a crop of companies that use generative AI to help make music. Any deal would help settle lawsuits between the two sides, said the people, who declined to be identified because the talks could fall apart.
#16:
I worked in the Writing Center in college, and whenever a student came in with an essay, we were supposed to make sure it had two things: an argument (“thesis”) and a reason to make that argument (“motive”). Everybody understood what a “thesis” is, whether or not they actually had one. But nobody understood “motive”. If I asked a student why they wrote the essay in front of them, they’d look at me funny. “Because I had to,” they’d say.
Most writing is bad because it’s missing a motive. It feels dead because it hasn’t found its reason to live. You can’t accomplish a goal without having one in the first place—writing without a motive is like declaring war on no one in particular.
I recommend this entire thing.
Zach Braff has signed on for the Scrubs update that’s in development at ABC.
Braff will reprise his role from the 2001-10 series as John, aka J.D., the narrator and central character for most of the show’s first run. ABC confirmed it was developing a Scrubs reboot in December, after creator Bill Lawrence, Braff and other members of the cast had for years said they’d like to reunite.
Jaime Eliezer Karas (Acapulco) has come aboard to direct Suburban Kings, a coming-of-age film penned by Peter Hoare (Kevin Can Wait), to be produced by Chris Mangano (Mangano Movies & Media), Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge (To The Stars Media), and Stan Spry (Evoke Entertainment).
The film follows Wolfgang Binder, a rebellious, skateboarding-obsessed 13-year-old, who is hellbent on spending the summer of ’99 cheering up his best friend after the tragic, unexpected death of his mother.
Michael Lopp, writing at Rands:
I’ve made a career being a human terrified by becoming irrelevant long before AI showed up to drive my car. You bet I am poking every bit of AI that I can. Daily. I am trying to figure out what it can and can’t do, and this article aside, I am optimistic, just like I’ve been for the last three decades, that revolutionary innovations will knock your socks off in the next few years. It’s still early days for AI. Really.
However, I am deeply suspicious of AI, especially after watching decades of social networks monetize our attention while teaching us to ignore facts and truth, minimizing our desire to understand. Many humans don’t check their facts; they believe what they read in the feed. Most humans believe the manufactured reality is designed to get them to believe someone else’s agenda. The convenience of these services and tools has made us lazy and, worse, not curious.
Maxwell Zeff, writing for TechCrunch:
A lawyer representing Anthropic admitted to using an erroneous citation created by the company’s Claude AI chatbot in its ongoing legal battle with music publishers, according to a filing made in a Northern California court on Thursday.
Claude hallucinated the citation with “an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors,” Anthropic says in the filing, first reported by Bloomberg. Anthropic’s lawyers explain that their “manual citation check” did not catch it, nor several other errors that were caused by Claude’s hallucinations.
Anthropic apologized for the error and called it “an honest citation mistake and not a fabrication of authority.”
The U.S. Justice Department is conducting a criminal antitrust probe of Live Nation and AEG’s response to concert cancellations at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, Live Nation confirmed while denying any collusion on Thursday. The probe is focused on whether the live-event companies colluded on refund policies for canceled concerts, according to an earlier report by Bloomberg News.
Collusion with competitors can be a criminal offense under antitrust laws. Probes do not always result in charges.
Lorde sat down with Rolling Stone:
As we talk in her apartment and around her city, Lorde often repeats how “terrified” she is to open up about the album — and to let the world hear it. There are songs she forebodingly describes as “rugged,” vulnerable, and messy, fitting for an artist who’s unlearning the conditioning that taught her to be digestible and “good.”
“There’s going to be a lot of people who don’t think I’m a good girl anymore, a good woman. It’s over,” she promises, eyes bright and full of fire. “It will be over for a lot of people, and then for some people, I will have arrived. I’ll be where they always hoped I’d be.”
When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.
By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration’s weaponization of government agencies and flurry of punitive actions against critics has raised the cost of opposition for a wide range of Americans.
Kyle Wiggers, writing at TechCrunch:
SoundCloud appears to have quietly changed its terms of use to allow the company to train AI on audio that users upload to its platform.
As spotted by tech ethicist Ed Newton-Rex, the latest version of SoundCloud’s terms include a provision giving the platform permission to use uploaded content to “inform, train, [or] develop” AI.
And, SoundCloud responded:
The February 2024 update to our terms of service was intended to clarify how content may interact with AI technologies within SoundCloud’s own platform. Use cases include personalized recommendations, content organization, fraud detection, and improvements to content identification with the help of AI technologies.
Ashley King, writing at Digital Music News:
“Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” said Morelle. “It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”
Morelle also linked to a pre-publication draft of a US Copyright Office report released last week—the third part in a longer report—that focuses on copyright and artificial intelligence. The report outlines that, while each case’s outcome cannot be pre-judged, there are limitations on the amount that AI companies can count on “fair use” as a defense when training their large language models (LLMs) on copyrighted work.
Mark Hoppus talked with The Independent:
He leans forward as if letting me in on a secret, “You know, if the band dissolved today, if Tom came to me today and said, ‘I’m out. I’m done with Blink,’ we would shut the whole thing down and it’d be OK. I’d be filled with nothing but gratitude and joy.”
Anxiety, I’ve come to realize, is a very expensive habit. It has cost me so much. A lot of misery, a lot of frustration, countless hours of sleep. It’s caused me to miss out on a lot of things that are important to me. How many family dinners have I ruined by letting my mind wander to what could go wrong? How many minutes of vacations have I missed out on because I was preoccupied, lost in spirals about things that hadn’t happened? How many opportunities have I passed up because I was too caught up in my own fears? How many nights did I waste lying awake at night, worrying about what might or might not happen?
