Ritika Puri

🔥 AI LICENSING FRAMEWORKS EMERGE AS PUBLISHERS FACE DIGITAL DISRUPTION 🔥 As generative AI continues to reshape content discovery and consumption, industry leaders are increasingly advocating for licensing frameworks that protect creators while enabling technological innovation. At a recent panel discussion titled "Licensing Is a Win-Win: The Exciting AI Partnerships Between Creators and Tech" part of the "The Story Starts With Us, " a day-long forum cohosted by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Copyright Alliance executives from publishing, entertainment, and AI development highlighted the commercial and ethical imperatives of establishing sustainable licensing models. 📊 Referrals from generative search results have increased by 5.5 million while top 100 publisher searches have declined by 64 million. This fundamental shift is transforming how publishers monetize content in the AI era. 💡 Why it matters: The publishing industry is experiencing its "Napster moment" as AI companies and content creators navigate a rapidly evolving landscape where proper licensing frameworks are crucial for sustaining both innovation and content creation. 🤝 By the numbers: 📈 50+ large content catalogs are now working with licensing platforms 💰 Startups like Moonvalley have raised $100M+ to build ethical AI models based on licensed content 📚 31-35% of content from books like Harry Potter series is "memorized verbatim" by certain AI models 🔮 What's next: New technologies can detect with "99.99999999% certainty" when content has been used in AI training, giving creators leverage in licensing negotiations. 🧠 Professional insight: Geoff Campbell, SVP of strategy and business development at Condé Nast, noted sustainable ecosystems benefit all parties: "If AI companies bring down the value of companies too much, who are going to be the human creators that are going to create the content that is going to teach these models something new?" How will your organization approach AI partnerships in this changing landscape? 🤔 MY TAKE: 😎 The first step is getting Big Tech and AI to acknowledge copyright is valid and that creators have a valid, legal claim for being compensated for their work that has been appropriated to teach the machines. #AILicensing #ContentCreation #PublishingIndustry #AIEthics #EdNawotka #EdwardNawotka #PublishersWeekly 👀 Looking for more? Read my full article Publishers Weekly https://lnkd.in/eXsNS5NA

16

SCOOP: Patreon is preparing a long-awaited overhaul of its newsletter platform in the coming months. And it's using the promise of that enhanced suite of tools—along with financial incentives—to woo popular Substack writers to its platform. Patreon dwarfs its rival in both the number of creators it has and the amount of money it pays them, but it has lagged Substack in newsletter functionality. Now, as Substack moves further into video and audio, Patreon is moving into email. For ADWEEK: https://lnkd.in/eZfxHfdj

19

The headlines this week suggest a sector in its ascendancy: one of the leaders in the SEO for AI space, Profound, announced new funding at a $1 billion valuation. (Early subscribers to The Aisle may recall that I interviewed the startup’s CEO James Cadwallader for this same newsletter back in December.) Yet in conversations this week with a half-dozen consumer brand leaders, the sentiment was noticeably more restrained.    The disagreement is less about whether AI-driven discovery matters for brands but more about what should be measured and how, what can realistically be outsourced, and how much of this work is actually new. All of my interviews and full reporting is available below for subscribers. And some bonus content from me on why that viral Citrini Research doomsday AI post gets DoorDash's strengths wrong. https://lnkd.in/e2zvD-xd

17

2 Comments

A few months back, independent CDPs were being scooped up by digitial experience players like Canadian 2x4s on the eve of a lumber tariff. Now it's data collaboration firms and large ad agency holding companies that are pairing up. What's going on here? 🔶 More data = a more comprehensive view of the customer = more effective campaigns. 🔶 There's value in that first-party data, if it can be mined in a privacy-safe environment. 🔶 Agencies have an unquenchable thirst for data and are adding to the data infrastructures they were already building out. As with the CDPs that were acquired in late 2024 and early 2025, this is all about the "new oil." #data #dataprivacy #datacleanrooms #digitaladvertising #advertising #marketing #adagencies #agencies https://lnkd.in/eQusjxri

10

I had a technically deep, slightly unsettling conversation with Manick Bhan from Search Atlas a few weeks back while we were both in Toronto for SEO IRL. We DIDN'T talk about "optimizing content" or "buying cheap backlinks" to survive until the next algorithm update. We talked about the fact that the floor is currently being ripped out from under the entire digital marketing industry. 🎙️ Google vs. ChatGPT: The Battle for Search Has Already Begun Watch the full podcast episode here: https://lnkd.in/erRMy3pQ Manick and I reflected on how SEO is being replaced by agentic search and how AI models actually read the web. Most businesses still don't know whether they even exist in AI answers. They're ranking well in Google and assume that translates into LLM relevance. It doesn't. We're living through a genuine architectural shift. This is not another algorithm update. It is a completely different way that information gets discovered, trusted and surfaced. In this episode we unpacked what my team at WLDM AI Research Lab has learned from analyzing 300,000+ AI citations across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini - data that shows how LLMs decide what to cite and why there are a lot of wrong assumptions and misinformation about these topics. Domain Authority? Barely correlates. Traffic? Often irrelevant. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness? Nice words. Not how it works. Search engines and LLMs are both forced to infer meaning - but they infer differently. Google looks at links, user signals and authority. LLMs look at semantic depth, text quality scores and co-citation patterns. Which means the optimization steps are fundamentally different. In our conversation, we broke down: - The Citation Paradox: Why your #1 Google ranking means nothing to an LLM - How sites with Zero Google traffic end up as top AI citations - Why personalization in AI generated answers is weaker than we assume + and why that’s dangerous - What 300,000+ real AI citations reveal about the future of trust (exclusive insights from WLDM’s data study) - How asking questions changes the model itself (LLM superposition) - Why agentic traffic is about to become one of the most important KPIs in digital marketing By 2027, 25-30% of search traffic will come from LLM interfaces. That's not far away. That's 24 months. You can either learn how to influence the LLMs now, or you can grab the popcorn and watch your business become invisible in real-time. Question for you: Have you checked whether your brand shows up in AI answers? If the answer is "no," what exactly is your plan for next year? 📺 Check out the full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/gagJmgeT #SEO #AI #LLMs #DigitalMarketing #AImodels #AICitations #AgenticTraffic #GEO #LLMs

28

8 Comments

A weekend read for #DevSecOps and #AIagent enthusiasts. This piece examines how the market is responding to new agents from GitLab and Harness. It features insightful comments and analysis from Anuj Tyagi, Roger Blakely, Jason Andersen, Jim Mercer, and Torsten Volk. Link below.

18

2 Comments

Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in enterprise usage according to this report from Menlo Ventures. Based on the conversations I have, that seems right. OpenAI’s models barely come up these days. https://lnkd.in/gFmZx6jH

19

2 Comments

I'm excited to announce the launch of Devex's new special edition podcast series, "Global Progress in the AI Era." In each episode, I'll speak with some of the leaders shaping how AI is being built, governed, and deployed — and what that means for efforts to address our biggest global challenges. The series comes at a pivotal moment — just after the India AI Impact Summit — as global debates on AI governance, financing, and deployment shift from high-level principles to decisions that will shape development outcomes for years to come. 🎙️ Our first episode is live: Governing the AI moment with U.N. Tech Envoy Amandeep Gill. We discuss what it will take to build guardrails in a fragmented geopolitical moment — and whether coalitions of governments, companies, and civil society can realistically manage the risks while expanding access. 🎧 And stay tuned for episodes with guests including Kanika Bahl, Nick Allardice, Kate Kallot, Alaa Murabit, Jonathan Reid, Alex Nawar, Manu Chopra, Han Sheng Chia, Dean Karlan, Iqbal Dhaliwal, Temina Madon. You can listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, YouTube — or wherever you get your podcasts. I’d love to hear what questions you think we should be asking — and who we should be talking to next. Let me know in the comments, or shoot me a note! https://lnkd.in/eemMX54J

75

5 Comments

Writing For Humans: Content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) is fast, scalable, and often surprisingly coherent. But left on its own, without expert AI writers, it can be wildly inaccurate, tone-deaf, and bland. That’s where our work begins. AI writers don’t just edit: We humanize, optimize, and deliver publish-ready content. Find out more at our latest blog: https://lnkd.in/eiBxqJyv #ai #AIwriters #artificialintelligence #publicrelations #marketing #advertising

10

#LN208 HubSpot's deepening collaboration with OpenAI marks a significant step in the evolution of CRM and marketing technology, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). This partnership goes beyond simple integrations, with HubSpot recently launching a "deep research connector" with ChatGPT. Key aspects of this collaboration include: ● Democratizing Advanced AI: The core idea is to bring powerful, enterprise-level AI capabilities, such as advanced data analysis and research, to SMBs that typically lack the resources or specialized data scientists for such tasks. By connecting HubSpot's CRM data directly to ChatGPT, businesses can ask complex questions and receive actionable insights from their own customer data. ● Enhanced Workflows and Productivity: The integration aims to streamline operations across marketing, sales, and service teams. Examples include marketers asking ChatGPT to identify high-converting customer segments for tailored nurture sequences, sales teams segmenting target companies for expansion opportunities, and support teams analyzing ticket volumes for staffing forecasts. This reduces "app hopping" and manual analysis. ● Focus on Actionable Insights: The collaboration emphasizes deriving deeper, contextual insights from CRM data rather than just generating text. This enables more informed decision-making and the automation of subsequent actions directly within the HubSpot platform, like launching email campaigns or activating customer service agents. ● Responsible AI Integration: HubSpot emphasizes that customer data used with the deep research connector is not used for AI training in ChatGPT, and access is controlled by user permissions within HubSpot, addressing common data privacy and security concerns. This collaboration positions HubSpot as a leader in making sophisticated AI accessible and practical for its vast SMB customer base, aiming to empower them to "play big" and compete more effectively in an AI-driven economy.

9

This right here is why writing industry professionals despise AI (well, this, and many other reasons). I came across a post here by Julia Angwin about her impending lawsuit against Grammarly. I'll link to it in the comments. Angwin shared with her followers that she learned that Grammarly's paid AI feature was presenting editing suggestions as if it was her. It used her name and likeness - without consent. She's not the only one. An article in NeimanLab by Laura Owen (link in the comments) uncovered more writers being cloned by Grammarly's tool without their permission. Folks, this is next-level scary. And don't even get me started on the unethical nature of it. The feature was available to subscribers paying $144 a year, so Grammarly was quite literally profiting off the reputations of writers who spent decades building their expertise, without so much as a phone call asking for their permission. Some of the writers cloned for the feature said the advice offered in their names weren't editing suggestions they would give, according to the NeimanLab report. Angwin filed her class action lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan, alleging Grammarly violated the privacy and publicity rights of hundreds of journalists, authors, and editors. The suit is seeking damages in excess of $5 million. Since the filing, her attorney has heard from 40 to 50 people who object to being featured in the tool without their consent, according to NeimanLab's report. Grammarly has since disabled the feature, with its parent company Superhuman's CEO acknowledging it "missed the mark." However, he also stated they believe the legal claims are without merit. Missed the mark, huh? The audacity is real. 🙄 I'll be watching this one closely to see how the courts handle it. We need this kind of legal precedent to get these AI tools (and the companies that develop them) under control. In the meantime, this is a cautionary tale for every writer, journalist, and creator out there. Your name, your voice, and your hard-earned expertise are worth protecting. Make sure you know your rights.

299

43 Comments

The new era of vibe coding is...vibe debugging. A little behind-the-scenes look at a new tool from Cursor, a hugely-popular AI-assisted coding platform, and a proof point for why churning at code at a higher velocity requires more safety checks https://lnkd.in/dP4akzms

60

4 Comments

Amid Meta's deal for Scale AI and its new Superintelligence lab, what do the headlines miss? I have some concrete ideas on this: https://lnkd.in/g6W_myfi Meta has agreed to invest $14.8 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, marking one of the largest AI-related investments to date and Meta’s biggest deal since its acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014. But what isn't being told in the PR on the deal?  Meta will acquire a 49% minority stake in Scale AI, rather than a full acquisition. This structure is designed to avoid triggering further antitrust scrutiny, as Meta is already engaged in legal battles with regulators over previous acquisitions. Scale AI’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, will assume a prominent role at Meta, leading a new “superintelligence” lab focused on advancing cutting-edge AI research. Wang will remain CEO of Scale AI, which will continue to operate independently. But is that what he will really be working on?

23

12 Comments

As Scale and Meta finalize their deal, OpenAI, one of Scale’s most prominent customers, has already been working for months to wind down its business with Scale and is vetting new partners, sources told Forbes. https://lnkd.in/guqZvJKx

31