Musicians’ Union Sues Major Labels for Artists’ Share of AI Song Generator Settlement Money
The American Federation of Musicians alleged that UMG and WMG "have refused to compensate the musicians whose work ... is fed into AI machines for profit."
🇺🇸 미국 · "FEDERATION" · 총 15건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.0
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 11,339건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.0(균형)입니다. 긍정 1건(0.0%)·중립 11,337건(100.0%)·부정 1건(0.0%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 19.1(중도 균형)입니다.
The American Federation of Musicians alleged that UMG and WMG "have refused to compensate the musicians whose work ... is fed into AI machines for profit."
For the second consecutive year, controversy has surrounded the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) girls’ track and field state championships because a biological male claimed several state titles. Last year, due to a pilot policy implemented by the CIF, the transgender athlete shared the highest spot on the podium with the top female finisher(s). Naturally, the ...
U.S. Soccer Federation employees lined the walkway of the National Training Center on Thursday afternoon.
Mehdi Taj said his federation has been dealing with FIFA, not the United States, in trying to obtain visas for Iran to play in the tournament that begins next week.
Insane: Mayor Zohran Mamdani has to bribe the city teachers union so that it will OK the Legislature delaying the impact of the noxious class-size law to help him balance his budget. This deal not only exposes how closely state lawmakers guard the interests of the United Federation of Teachers, its details reveal how perverse...
For 30 years, soccer has been "the sport of the future." Could a World Cup on home soil and an AI-powered talent revolution make it the sport of now?
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten complains that writing her newly released book “almost killed” her. But based on AFT’s own financial records, it’s the union members who suffered the actual injury. Hyperbolically titled, “Why Fascists Fear Teachers,” the book was published last September by an imprint of Penguin Random House and represents Weingarten’s […]
In 1987, Richard Greenhill, a British photographer who was fascinated by (but had no actual training in) robotics, decided he wanted to build a life-size humanoid that could do useful things, like carrying luggage. He was working at a startup called Intergalactic Robots, but he couldn’t convince anyone there to build such a machine, so he set about building one himself, in his attic. To help with his project, he organized a weekly get-together of a dozen or so like-minded folks. Every Wednesday night, his wife, Sally, would make a big pot of spaghetti, and the group would tinker with components scavenged from old printers and picked up from junkyards. They called themselves the Shadow Group. They eventually constructed several different robots, but their main project was the two-legged Shadow Walker. In 1987, photographer Richard Greenhill organized a weekly gathering of DIY enthusiasts to work on projects in his attic, including the Shadow Walker. Richard Greenhill and David Buckley Greenhill’s friend David Buckley, a robotics and animatronics expert he’d met at Intergalactic, sketched out a rough design based on medical textbooks of human bone structure and muscle movement. The robot’s skeleton, made of maple, was greatly simplified—only one bone in the lower leg and a single wide toe on each foot. The ankle’s double-axis design allowed for two degrees of movement. The knee had no complicating kneecap. Greenhill didn’t want the robot to use motors, so its movement was controlled using compressed air to extend and contract 28 “air-muscles”—his version of a McKibben muscle, invented in the 1950s to mimic musculature with pneumatics. The muscles were connected to the bones across eight joints (hips, knees, ankles, toes), which provided 12 degrees of freedom. RELATED: The Short, Strange Life of the First Friendly Robot The robot’s headless torso held the control valves, electronics, and computer interfaces. It stood 168 centimeters tall and 46 cm wide and weighed about 38 kilograms. The group managed to get the robot to stand up reliably and balance itself; it could even regain its center if pushed a little. But walking turned out to be more of a challenge. Rich Walker joined the group as a teenager and began writing software to get the robot to stand. He was particularly interested in using neural networks to solve balancing problems, although he ran into a number of hardware obstacles, including the unreliability of the sensors and the valves, and the robot’s overall fragility. Over time, Walker and the team developed a standard library of routines to control the robot. Walker wrote a detailed description of the Shadow Walker in 1999, which is available on David Buckley’s website. The 1st International Robot Olympics By the time the Shadow Group began developing Shadow Walker, engineers in academia and industry had been working on robotics for several decades. The world’s first industrial robot, the Unimate, debuted in 1961, and in 1967 Donald Michie and others began building a series of Freddy robots to investigate machine intelligence. The IEEE created its first dedicated robotics organization in 1984 when it established the IEEE Robotics and Automation Council, which became the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in 1987. Also in 1987, the nonprofit International Federation of Robotics was established to promote research, development, use, and cooperation in the field of robotics. As Shadow Walker pushed the limits for a DIY humanoid robot, industrial humanoids were also gaining ground. In 1986, Honda began working on its experimental (E-series) and later the prototype (P-series) humanoid robots, finally unveiling the P2 in 1996. The P2 stood 183 cm tall and weighed 210 kg. It was the first humanoid capable of stable, autonomous walking. This work eventually led to the development of the groundbreaking ASIMO. Greenhill’s friend, roboticist David Buckley, consulted medical textbooks to create Shadow Walker’s humanoid design.Richard Greenhill and David Buckley In the late 1980s, the public was both fascinated and horrified by the potential of robots. Businesses saw robots as a way to increase productivity, while workers worried they would take their jobs. Children viewed them as wondrous toys, while people with disabilities embraced them as tools of liberation. Military experts hoped robots would fight wars without endangering human soldiers, while politicians pondered if robots might eventually get to vote. Philosophers thought robots could challenge our notions of intelligence (and stupidity), while the religious struggled with concerns about the human race in a robot-dominated future. Shadow Walker’s simplified anatomy included only one bone in the lower leg and a single wide toe on each foot.Science Museum Group Peter Mowforth, cofounder of the Turing Institute in Glasgow, noted these disparate visions for robots when he announced the 1st International Robot Olympics, to be held in 27 and 28 September 1990 and hosted by the Turing Institute and the University of Strathclyde. The Olympics would round up the world’s best robots and showcase them head-to-head. Mowforth himself thought all of the competing visions of robots were overblown. Steeped in machine learning research and robotics development, he knew firsthand the limitations of the state of the art: Robots rarely worked as intended, easily broke down, and glitched over seemingly trivial problems. He envisioned the Robot Olympics as a testbed to assess what the latest generation of robots could and could not do. At the 1990 Robot Olympics, held in Glasgow, Shadow Walker wore pants to conceal its pneumatic “air-muscles” from competitors.Adam Hart-Davis/Science Source The call for participation was wide open. Instead of having predetermined categories of competition, the organizers opted to see who applied to compete and then group them based on their claimed capabilities. In addition to picking the winners of individual events, the judges would select an overall Olympic champion based on the quality of the hardware, the sophistication of behavior, and novelty. Other prizes were given for young competitors, technologies that showed commercial potential, and design. In the end, more than 50 robots were entered, from a mix of universities, industry, and hobbyist groups from Canada, France, India, Japan, Mexico, the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia. There were plenty of disappointments. Trolleyman, a golf-cart-like wheeled robot, suffered a power failure while carrying the opening Olympic torch through the streets of Glasgow. The pile rug in the arena tripped up many robots that had been trained only on flat, smooth floors. David Buckley later concluded that the events were too difficult, and that the Olympics didn’t push development forward. Of course, there were winners. In a surprise triumph for vintage technology, the fully mechanical 19th-century Japanese Archer from the Museum of Automata in York, England, won gold in javelin, beating out competitors more than 100 years its junior. The overall Olympic Champion was Yamabico, Shoji Suzuki’s entry from the University of Tsukuba, in Japan, which won bronze in obstacle avoidance and gold in wall following, but was disqualified in the talking category for not speaking English. The Shadow Group had high hopes for Shadow Walker. Unfortunately, though, it failed to take a step, and the biped race was won by the Cardiff University Biped. Shadow Walker now resides in the collections of the Science Museum in London. The Legacy of Shadow Walker In 1997, a paying customer in search of a robotic leg compelled the Shadow Group to get serious and become a registered company. Shadow Robot is now Britain’s oldest robotics company. Rich Walker, who had left the Shadow Group to earn a B.A. in mathematics and a diploma in computer science at the University of Cambridge, joined Shadow Robot in 1999 as technical director. Today he’s the director of the company. Shadow Robot specializes in durable robot hands rather than walking robots. But the focus on hands is also a legacy of the Shadow Group. Walker remembers that the Shadow Group’s first humanoid hand in the late 1990s was impressive simply for being able to pick up a pint of beer (a smooth-sided, thin-walled glass). Today, Shadow Robot’s hands are testbeds for dexterity. Gone are the pneumatic muscles, replaced by actuators that move each finger with precision. The classic model contains 20 motors, allowing for abductive and adductive movement with 24 degrees of freedom. Shadow Walker’s operator wore a data suit that captured his movements and allowed the robot to copy them.Richard Greenhill In a recent blog post, Sejal Parsotomo, senior marketing executive at Shadow Robot, wrote that while humanoid robots are great for public relations, specialized dexterity is key for success: A robot that can walk into your factory may be impressive, but a robot that can reliably manipulate objects is transformative. In its struggles to take more than a few steps, the Shadow Walker showed the inherent difficulty that robots had in mastering even low-level skills. In August 2025, Beijing hosted the World Humanoid Robot Games. Competing in sports such as gymnastics, soccer, and track events, as well as more “useful” tasks like hotel cleaning and sorting medicine, these robots could literally have run circles around the competitors in the first Robot Olympics 35 years earlier. And yet, there is still so much work needed in order for robots to navigate the human-built environment. Despite the astonishing progress, we’re still not all that close to actually useful humanoid robots. Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. An abridged version of this article appears in the June 2026 print issue as “Learning to Walk.” References Richard Greenhill gives an overview of his life and the founding of the Shadow Group in a post on Shadow Robot’s corporate website. David Buckley has a compilation of resources on the Shadow Biped Walker, including specifications from the 1999 iteration and a brochure from the 1st International Robot Olympics. There is coverage of the Robot Olympics worthy of a gossip sheet in La Repubblica and lovely footage of the competition in this TV-am interview of Peter Mowforth by Lorraine Kelly.
After Ukrainian gymnasts protested the Russian and Belarusian anthems at this week’s European Championships, the Ukrainian federation has issued a call for global action.
The Russian government’s most notorious troll is leaning into the recent bombing of a Romanian apartment building after a drone intended to detonate in Ukraine drifted off course. Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia and current deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, made a thinly veiled reference to the drone […]
After FISU eased restrictions on Russian and Belarusian athletes, the International Skating Union could join the growing wave of sport federations lifting national bans.
Transgender track athlete and Jurupa Valley High School senior AB Hernandez outdid his female opponents again this year and grabbed the gold in three events at California Interscholastic Federation’s (CIF) Southern Section Track and Field Masters, held Saturday in Ventura County. The post Trans High School Athlete Sweeps Jumping Events Against Girl Track Stars in California Regionals appeared first on Breitbart.
Iran says its 2026 World Cup training camp has been moved from the United States to Mexico after getting approval from FIFA, the federation announced.
The president of the governing body of Iranian soccer said Saturday the nation's World Cup training base has been moved to Mexico from the United States after getting approval from FIFA.
On April 1, 2026, Russian officials announced the liberation of the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic — for the third time. The first announcement came under then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in July 2022. The second one, in July 2025, came from the “republic’s” own head. By that point, Shoigu had already been reshuffled to the Security Council of the Russian Federation, but not for lying about Luhansk. The neat reports about Russia’s successes kept coming.In the fifth year of what the Kremlin calls a special military operation, that pattern raises a question worth taking seriously: is winning still Russia’s objective?Russia entered The post While the War Continues in Ukraine, the Kremlin’s Real Battlefield is at Home appeared first on War on the Rocks.