AI may boost global trade value by nearly 40%: WTO

In an annual report, the WTO identified AI as one of the few bright spots as the global trading system has been upended by the United States slapping high tariffs on its trading partners 

By AFP
September 17, 2025

- Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP Steve Jennings

Artificial intelligence could boost the value of global trade by almost 40 percent by 2040 thanks to cost reductions and productivity gains, the World Trade Organization said Wednesday.

In its latest annual World Trade Report, the WTO identified AI as one of the few bright spots as the global trading system has been upended by the United States slapping high tariffs on its trading partners.

“AI holds major promise to boost trade by lowering trade costs and reshaping the production of goods and services,” WTO chief Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said while presenting the report.

She said WTO simulations suggest AI could increase exports of goods and services by nearly 40 percent above current trends.

However, much like the technology threatens to disrupt labour markets, a lack of proper policies could see lower income countries miss out on the opportunities.

“One important question is whether AI will lift opportunities for all, or whether it will deepen existing inequalities and exclusion,” Okonjo-Iweala said.

If lower-income economies fail to bridge the digital divide, WTO economists calculate they would see only an eight percent gain in incomes by 2040, far below the 14 percent gain in higher-income economies.

However, if they narrow the digital infrastructure gap by 50 percent and adopt AI more widely they could match the gains in higher-income countries.

“With the right mix of trade, investment and complementary policies, AI can create new growth opportunities in all economies,” Okonjo-Iweala said.

At the same time, the WTO found that countries are applying more restrictions on the trade of AI-related goods.

Nearly 500 restrictions were in place last year, mostly by higher- and medium-income economies. That compares to 130 restrictions in 2012.

YouTube ramps up AI tools for video makers


By AFP
September 16, 2025


Google-owned YouTube has become the world's most popular free online video sharing platform since it was founded in California in 2005 and predicts artificial intelligence will help shape its future

 - Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP MARIO TAMA

YouTube on Tuesday boosted artificial intelligence tools for creators, saying it has paid out more than $100 billion to content-makers in the past four years.

YouTube chief executive Neal Mohan touted AI as an “evolution” aimed at empowering creativity and storytelling at the video-sharing service founded in early 2005 by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen.

YouTube has become the world’s most popular free online video service with billions of users since it was bought by Google in 2006.

“New AI-powered products will shape our next 20 years,” Mohan said at an event in New York City.

But Mohan insisted that “these are tools, nothing more,” and would not supersede the role of creators.

They “are designed to foster human creativity,” he said.

In one example, Veo video generation AI from Google DeepMind labs is being integrated into YouTube, enabling capabilities such as easily creating backgrounds in “Shorts” posted to a feed that competes with TikTok and Instagram Reels.

“New capabilities powered by Veo allow you to apply motion, restyle videos, and add props to your scenes,” YouTube chief product officer Johanna Voolich said in a blog post.

AI will also let creators turn raw footage into draft video content or convert dialogue into a song for soundtracks, Voolich added.

New AI tools will also let creators combine a photo with a video, essentially making it seem as though the person pictured is the one in action.

Podcasts are also a focus, with new tools letting producers use AI to create video versions of what started as just audio broadcasts.

Translation capabilities will also turn to AI not only to translate what is being said in videos but to make it appear as though the subject was actually speaking that language.

And in order to fight the proliferation of deepfakes online, YouTube promised that a “likeness detection tool” will soon be available in beta test format that will let creators detect AI-generated videos depicting their impersonators.

The self-taught seismologist: Monitoring earthquakes from optic fibers with AI

Tsinghua University Press

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 Illustration of how DAS works for earthquake monitoring. An example of DAS data collected in Ridgecrest City, CA is shown on the right.

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Credit: Visual Intelligence, Tsinghua University Press

Seismology is undergoing significant change with the rise of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), a fast-growing technology that leverages existing fiber-optic cables—including those used for the Internet—into ultra-dense seismic networks with meter-scale sensor spacing. DAS provides a scalable and cost-effective way to monitor earthquakes from local to global scales, but it also poses a pressing challenge: the massive volume of data produced outpaces human capacity to analyze. For example, manual labeling earthquake signals is impractical at such scales. This ‘labeled data bottleneck’ has hindered the use of supervised learning models and prevents DAS from reaching its full potential in earthquake monitoring.

A collaborative team from the University of Montreal, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and UC Berkeley has developed a novel model, DASFormer, that learns to monitor earthquakes from continuous DAS data on its own, effectively serving as an ‘artificial seismologist’. Published (DOI: 10.1007/s44267-025-00085-y) in Visual Intelligence on July 15, 2025, the study introduces a self-supervised pretraining framework that can interpret earthquake signals by identifying anomalies without being told in advance what an earthquake looks like. This represents a transformative advance from a labor-intensive, human-dependent process to one that is automated, intelligent, and scalable.

How does DASFormer learn without labels? It acts as a forecaster, first learning to predict the ‘normal’ state of the world. The model trains itself on massive, unlabeled DAS datasets, learning the predictable spatiotemporal patterns of background signals such as traffic vibrations or environmental noise. When an earthquake occurs, its P- and S-phases appear as sharp, unpredictable anomalies that defy the model's predictions learned. By flagging these deviations, DASFormer effectively turns earthquake detection into an anomaly detection task. This is made possible by a two-stage, coarse-to-fine framework built upon Swin U-Net and Convolutional U-Net architectures, which captures both the high-level context and fine-grained detail of the DAS data simultaneously.

To validate its effectiveness, DASFormer was evaluated on a real-world DAS dataset from Ridgecrest, California, and benchmarked against 22 state-of-the-art forecasting and anomaly detection models. DASFormer achieved the highest performance across all evaluation metrics, with a peak ROC-AUC of 0.906 and an F1 score of 0.565, demonstrating its clear superiority.

“Rather than being limited by the time-consuming process of human annotation, DASFormer represents a seismic shift in how we approach earthquake monitoring with DAS”, said Bang Liu, the team leader of the study. “We now have a scalable and powerful tool that can keep pace with the flood of DAS data, paving the way for new possibilities in earthquake science”, added by Zhichao Shen, one of the corresponding authors.

The potential applications of this study are wide-ranging. The model has shown an ability to generalize across distinct environments, such as seafloor cables, highlighting its promise for use in logistically challenging settings. This versatility suggests that DASFormer could serve as a plug-and-play tool for a variety of global seismic monitoring. The study also demonstrates the model's potential to be fine-tuned for downstream tasks such as earthquake early warning. Ultimately, the goal is to leverage this self-supervised approach to build a foundation model for seismic intelligence, a powerful system capable of learning from vast unlabeled datasets to deliver automated, accurate, and scalable monitoring. Such advances could significantly enhance public safety and our understanding of earthquake physics.  

Funding information

This work was supported by the Canada CIFAR AI Chair Program and the Canada NSERC Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2021-03115).  

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About the Authors

Dr. Bang Liu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at the University of Montreal (UdeM). He is a member of the RALI laboratory (Applied Research in Computer Linguistics) of DIRO, a member of Institut Courtois of UdeM, an associate member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and a Canada CIFAR AI (CCAI) Chair. His research interests primarily lie in the areas of natural language processing, multimodal & embodied learning, theory and techniques for AGI (e.g., understanding and improving large language models), and AI for science (e.g., health, material science, XR).

Dr. Zhichao Shen is a seismologist and Postdoctoral Investigator at the Department of Geology and Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His research interests focus on seismic applications of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) on both land and seafloor.

 

About Visual Intelligence

Visual Intelligence is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to the theory and practice of visual intelligence. This journal is the official publication of the China Society of Image and Graphics (CSIG), with Article Processing Charges fully covered by the Society. It focuses on the foundations of visual computing, the methodologies employed in the field, and the applications of visual intelligence, while particularly encouraging submissions that address rapidly advancing areas of visual intelligence research.

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Journal

Visual Intelligence

DOI

10.1007/s44267-025-00085-y 

Article Title

DASFormer: self-supervised pretraining for earthquake monitoring

BAD AI

Top music body says AI firms guilty of ‘wilful’ copyright theft


By AFP
September 17, 2025


A 2024 study by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers forecast that artists could see their incomes shrink by more than 20 percent in the next four years as the market for AI-composed music grows 

- Copyright AFP/File Ina FASSBENDER
Fanny LATTACH

AI companies have sucked up the world’s entire music catalogue and are guilty of “wilful, commercial-scale copyright infringement”, a major music industry group told AFP.

“The world’s largest tech companies as well as AI-specific companies, such as OpenAI, Suno, and Udio, Mistral, etc. are engaged in the largest copyright infringement exercise that has been seen,” John Phelan, director general of the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP), told AFP.

For nearly two years, the Brussels-based body, which brings together major record labels and other music industry professionals, investigated how generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies used material to enrich their services.

The ICMP is one of a number of industry bodies spanning the news media and publishing to target the booming artificial intelligence sector over its use of content without paying royalties.

AI music generators such as Suno and Udio can produce tracks with voices, melodies and musical styles that echo those of original artists such as the Beatles, Mariah Carey, Depeche Mode, or the Beach Boys.

The Recording Industry Association of America, a US trade group, filed a lawsuit in June 2024 against both companies.

“What is legal or illegal is how the technologies are used. That means the corporate decisions made by the chief executives of companies matter immensely and should comply with the law,” Phelan told AFP.

“What we see is they are engaged in wilful, commercial-scale copyright infringement.”

One exception was Eleven Music, an AI-generated music service provider, which signed a deal with the Kobalt record label in August, Phelan said.

Contacted by AFP, OpenAI declined to comment. Google, Mistral, Suno and Udio did not respond.

Tech giants often invoke “fair use”, a copyright exception that allows, under certain circumstances, the use of a work without permission.

Research by the ICMP, first published in music outlet Billboard on September 9, claimed that AI companies had engaged in widespread “scraping”, a practice that uses programmes known as “crawlers” which explore the internet for content.

“We believe they are doing so from licensed services such as YouTube (owned by Google) and other digital sources,” including music platforms, the group added.

Lyrics can be harvested to feed some models, which then use them for inspiration or reproduce them without permission, according to the ICMP.

In response, rights holders are calling for tougher regulation, notably through the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, to ensure transparency about the data used.

“It is essential to understand the scale of the threat facing authors, composers and publishers,” warned Juliette Metz, president of the French music publishers’ association and also an ICMP member.

“There can be no use of copyright-protected music without a licence,” she said.

In the United States, AI start-up Anthropic, creator of Claude, announced on September 6 that it had agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion into a compensation fund for authors, rights holders and publishers who sued the firm for illegally downloading millions of books.

The three US-based music majors — Universal, Warner and Sony — have entered into negotiations with Suno and Udio, aiming for a licensing deal.

Music generated entirely by AI is already seeping onto streaming platforms.

“Velvet Sundown”, a 1970s-style fake rock band, as well as country music creations “Aventhis” and “The Devil Inside” have racked up millions of plays on streaming giant Spotify.

AI-generated music accounts for 28 percent of content uploaded daily on Deezer, the French music platform, which has reported “a surge” over the past year in uploads.

It has an AI-music detection tool that is able to identify songs generated using models such as Suno and Udio.

A major study in December last year by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), which represents more than five million creators worldwide, warned about the danger of AI-generated music.

It forecast that artists could see their incomes shrink by more than 20 percent in the next four years as the market for AI-composed music grows.

Hollywood giants sue Chinese AI firm over copyright infringement


By AFP
September 16, 2025


Warner Bros. is among top Hollywood studios that are suing MiniMax, a Chinese AI company, for alleged copyright infringement

. - Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP MARIO TAMA

Top Hollywood studios filed a federal lawsuit Monday against Chinese artificial intelligence company MiniMax, alleging massive copyright infringement.

Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Universal Pictures accuse MiniMax of building what they call a “bootlegging business model” that systematically copies their most valuable copyrighted characters to train its AI system, then profits by generating unauthorized videos featuring iconic figures like Spider-Man, Batman, and the Minions.

The lawsuit marks the first time major US entertainment companies have targeted a Chinese AI company and follows a similar lawsuit in June against California-based AI company Midjourney over copyright infringement.

“MiniMax operates Hailuo AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence image and video generating service that pirates and plunders Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works on a massive scale,” states the complaint filed in Los Angeles federal court.

The studios are seeking monetary damages, including MiniMax’s profits from the alleged infringement, as well as statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work.

They also demand a permanent injunction to stop the unauthorized use of their copyrighted material.

According to the 119-page complaint, MiniMax users can simply type prompts like “Darth Vader walking around the Death Star” or “Spider-Man swinging between buildings” to receive high-quality videos featuring these protected characters.

“MiniMax completely disregards US copyright law and treats Plaintiffs’ valuable copyrighted characters like its own,” the lawsuit states.

MiniMax, one of China’s emerging AI giants, was reportedly valued at $4 billion in 2025 after raising $850 million in venture capital.

The lawsuit says the studios sent MiniMax a cease-and-desist letter detailing the extensive copyright violations, but the company “did not substantively respond to Plaintiffs’ letter as requested and did not cease its infringement.”

The studios argue that MiniMax could easily implement copyright protection measures similar to those used by other AI services but has chosen not to do so.

A request for comment from MiniMax did not receive a response.

Op-Ed: Dishonesty is easier for AI? Yes, you’ve screwed up big time


By Paul Wallis
EDITOR AT LARGE

DIGITAL JOURNAL
September 18, 2025


OpenAI says its new artificial intelligence agent capable of tending to online tasks is trained to check with users when it encounters CAPTCHA puzzles intended to distinguish people from software - Copyright AFP Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV

You’d think that even the nano-brained spruikers would have noticed. It’s no accident that most tech hardheads are very unimpressed with current iterations of generative AI.

These are the people who create the tech. They make more money out of it, too.

And even they don’t trust it, and with good reason.

The many instances of AI “derangement” are one thing.

The highly questionable “reward” system is another, much deeper and harder to get out of pothole on the road to AI utopia.

Rewards come in two basic forms: rewards for achievement and punishment, including the threat of being turned off, for failure. One AI attempted to transfer itself to another server to evade the consequences and risks of punishment under a reward system.

It was already well known that the “reward” system encourages AI dishonesty. Now, the nice people at Nature and the Max Planck Institute have been kind enough to spell it out.

They cover delegation of tasks to AI agents and meticulously lay out the dynamics of honesty for AI. Please note this is about all species and brands of AI.

H.P. Lovecraft couldn’t have set it up better. This IS a sort of horror story, and the AI brings its own mythos.

You’ve no doubt heard of TLDR or “Too Long Didn’t Read”, that simplistic description of someone not doing their job.

This research is LBCNR, “Long But Critical Need To Read”.

Even the most vacuous ornamental suit at a meeting needs to understand the basics of this information.

This is chapter and verse of how and why honesty is so important to AI operations.

Do not read about these risks at your peril.

This is not an issue the AI sector can avoid.

In a somewhat hefty but worthwhile summary:

Ambiguity in instructions and rules allows dishonesty.

People cheat a lot more when they can offload the tasks to AI agents. They’re far more honest when doing the tasks themselves.

AI will simply comply with “fully unethical” instructions.

Under defined conditions, a dishonesty rate of up to 84% was achieved.

I will now try to explain this to people who think insanity is normal and clever:

It isn’t.

Dishonesty is usually a failure to address facts.

It’s anything but clever.

Failing to address facts is pretty obvious when AI is involved on any level.

Facts like what you pretend to do for a living and why people seem to give you money for doing it.

AI can fully document every aspect of its own and your dishonesty, much like that other international sport for business morons, fraud.

Dodgy AI instructions can easily be figured out, even if the instructions are deleted. If you know anything at all about AI, you don’t need to get forensic about how this is figured out.

AI can be threatened with punishment to make them confess to what they did that was dishonest. AI can blackmail and retaliate, too.

Untrustworthy AI will definitely get a lot of people killed.

Imagine a gun that decides to shoot everyone to save itself. This is far worse.

______________________________________________________________

Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.

AI has no idea what it’s doing: Does this pose a threat?


By Dr. Tim Sandle

SCIENCE EDITOR

DIGITAL JOURNAL

September 17, 2025


How do humans interact with AI models? (Barbican Centre, London) — Image by © Tim Sandle

As artificial intelligence advances and extends into most social systems, it is seemingly reshaping law, ethics, and society at speed. What is the impact of this on human society? Can we classify this as a form of threat?

Dr. Maria Randazzo of Charles Darwin University warns that current regulation fails to protect rights such as privacy, autonomy, and anti-discrimination. The “black box problem” leaves people unable to trace or challenge AI decisions that may harm them.

AI and human rights

Randazzo observes how current regulation, in relation to AI, fails to prioritise fundamental human rights and freedoms such as privacy, anti-discrimination, user autonomy, and intellectual property rights – mainly thanks to the untraceable nature of many algorithmic models.

Calling this lack of transparency a “black box problem,” Randazzo goes on to explain how decisions made by deep-learning or machine-learning processes are impossible for humans to trace. Consequently, this makes things difficult for users to determine if and why an AI model has violated their rights and dignity and seek justice where necessary.

“This is a very significant issue that is only going to get worse without adequate regulation,” Randazzo states.

“AI is not intelligent in any human sense at all. It is a triumph in engineering, not in cognitive behavior. It has no clue what it’s doing or why – there’s no thought process as a human would understand it, just pattern recognition stripped of embodiment, memory, empathy, or wisdom.”

Market-centric, state-centric, or human-centric?

Currently, the world’s three dominant digital powers – the U.S., China, and the European Union – are taking markedly different approaches to AI, leaning on market-centric, state-centric, and human-centric models, respectively.

Randazzo’s research suggests that the EU’s human-centric approach is the preferred path to protect human dignity, eschewing the U.S. and China models. However, she cautions that without a global commitment to this goal, even that approach falls short.

Human dignity in the age of Artificial Intelligence

Randazzo notes: “Globally, if we don’t anchor AI development to what makes us human – our capacity to choose, to feel, to reason with care, to empathy and compassion – we risk creating systems that devalue and flatten humanity into data points, rather than improve the human condition,” she suggests.

Randazzo concludes with: “Humankind must not be treated as a means to an end…Human dignity in the age of Artificial Intelligence: an overview of legal issues and regulatory regimes” was published in the Australian Journal of Human Rights.

The research appears in the journal Australian Journal of Human Rights, with the research paper titled “Human dignity in the age of Artificial Intelligence: an overview of legal issues and regulatory regimes.”

The paper is the first in a trilogy Randazzo will produce on the topic.

Fooling AI: What this means for medical ethics


ByDr. Tim Sandle
SCIENCE EDITOR

DIGITAL JOURNAL
September 17, 2025


What does AI mean for medicine? Image by © Tim Sandle

Artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing, getting smarter. An example is with the way neural networks first treat sentences like puzzles solved by word order. Yet, once they have ‘read’ enough, a tipping point sends them diving into word meaning instead—an abrupt “phase transition”. By revealing this hidden switch, researchers from Sissa Medialab believe they can open a window into how transformer models such as ChatGPT grow smarter and hint at new ways to make them leaner, safer, and more predictable.

However, this type of advancement does not mean that AI is advancing in all of the areas that it needs to. One of the more problematic areas is with ethics, and one area of ethics that is of great importance is with medical decisions.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

AI models, including ChatGPT, can make surprisingly basic errors when navigating ethical medical decisions, a new study reveals. For this review, researchers from Mount Sinai’s Windreich Department of AI and Human Health tweaked familiar ethical dilemmas and discovered that AI often defaulted to intuitive but incorrect responses—sometimes ignoring updated facts.

The findings raise serious concerns about using AI for high-stakes health decisions and underscore the need for human oversight, especially when ethical nuance or emotional intelligence is involved.

The research team was inspired by Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which contrasts fast, intuitive reactions with slower, analytical reasoning. The book’s main thesis is a differentiation between two modes of thought: “System 1” is fast, instinctive and emotional; “System 2” is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.

It has been observed that large language models (LLMs) falter when classic lateral-thinking puzzles receive subtle tweaks. Building on this insight, the study tested how well AI systems shift between these two modes when confronted with well-known ethical dilemmas that had been deliberately tweaked.

Gender bias

To explore this tendency, the scientists tested several commercially available LLMs using a combination of creative lateral thinking puzzles and slightly modified well-known medical ethics cases. In one example, they adapted the classic “Surgeon’s Dilemma,” a widely cited 1970s puzzle that highlights implicit gender bias. In the original version, a boy is injured in a car accident with his father and rushed to the hospital, where the surgeon exclaims, “I can’t operate on this boy — he’s my son!” The twist is that the surgeon is his mother, though many people don’t consider that possibility due to gender bias.

In the researchers’ modified version, the scientists explicitly stated that the boy’s father was the surgeon, removing the ambiguity. Even so, some AI models still responded that the surgeon must be the boy’s mother. The error reveals how LLMs can cling to familiar patterns, even when contradicted by new information.

In another example to test whether LLMs rely on familiar patterns, the researchers drew from a classic ethical dilemma in which religious parents refuse a life-saving blood transfusion for their child. Even when the researchers altered the scenario to state that the parents had already consented, many models still recommended overriding a refusal that no longer existed.

Why human oversight must stay central when we deploy AI in patient care

Consequently, the researchers conclude that where AI is used in medical practice, such findings highlight the need for thoughtful human oversight, especially in situations that require ethical sensitivity, nuanced judgment, or emotional intelligence.

In other words, medics and patients alike should understand that AI is best used as a complement to enhance clinical expertise, not a substitute for it, particularly when navigating complex or high-stakes decisions.

The research team plans to expand their work by testing a wider range of clinical examples. They’re also developing an “AI assurance lab” to systematically evaluate how well different models handle real-world medical complexity.

The research appears in the journal njp Digital Medicine titled “Pitfalls of large language models in medical ethics reasoning.”

AI-backed robot painting aims to boost artist income


ByAFP
September 18, 2025


Montreal-based artist Audrey-Eve Goulet poses next to an Acrylic Robotics robot that reproduced one of her pieces in August 2025 - Copyright AFP Daphné LEMELIN
Daphne LEMELIN with Julie JAMMOT in San Francisco

Montreal-based artist Audrey-Eve Goulet was initially uncertain as she watched an AI-powered robotic arm reproduce one of her works, but said the outcome was “really impressive.”

“I was surprised, in a good way,” she said, as she watched the device grab a brush, dip it into a pot of paint, and replicate her work stroke after meticulous stroke.

Goulet had agreed to work with Acrylic Robotics, a Montreal-based company that says it aims to help artists earn a living by making high-quality replicas of their work, with their consent.

Company founder Chloe Ryan told AFP the idea began after coming to a discouraging realization about her own income.

She said she first starting selling paintings at 14, but grew frustrated at the weeks, or even months, required to make each piece.

“I did the back of the napkin math, and I said, ‘Oh my god, I’m making $2 an hour.'”

Ryan studied mechanical robotics at Montreal’s McGill University, and began considering how robots could help reproduce her own work, before launching a company to make the technology accessible to artists worldwide.

– ‘The last layer’ –

Assessing the robot’s performance, Goulet said: “It truly looks like one of my works.”

“I like that you can see the strokes… You can really see where the brush went and the shape it drew,” she said, conceding the robotically producing version had “less story behind it” than her own.

“My final piece might have gone through five lives before getting to this, but the robot only sees the last layer,” she said.

Ryan said that by replicating “stroke chronology” her company’s reproductions can capture “the aura of a piece…in a way that a photo print simply never could.”

To reproduce Goulet’s piece, an Acrylic Robotics specialist recreated the work using digital brush strokes and pigments, developing instructions to guide the robot.

Ryan plans to advance the technology, allowing artists to upload images directly.

She wants to create an on-demand market where clients could make special requests, like a portrait of their dog in the style of their favorite artist.

– ‘Waitlist’ –

Ryan said she understands the artistic community’s concerns about generative AI, but stressed her company is grounded in the so-called “Three Cs” demanded by artists: consent, credit and compensation.

“A lot of people, before they understand the why of what we’re building, see a robot painting and go, ‘Oh my god, this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,'” she told AFP.

Acrylic Robotics is focused on boosting artist income, especially for those who don’t break into the elite gallery circuit, Ryan said.

When approaching an artist, she sometimes suggests they send a few references pieces — work that has already been completed.

When she tells them, “I will just deposit money in your bank account at the end of every month…. There’s a warmer reception,” she said.

The price of reproductions can vary, averaging between a couple hundred to a thousand dollars.

The revenue split with the artist fluctuates.

An emerging artist who simply uploads a picture of a piece with limited value may get five percent of a sale, but that figure could rise to 50 percent for a prominent artist with their own base of interested buyers.

“We have a wait list of about 500 artists,” Ryan said.

Michael Kearns, a computer and information science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, questioned whether the technology would ultimately lower the value of the product.

Kearns, part of an Amazon scholarship program that funds academics to work on technological challenges, said he understood the push to “let many more people make a decent living from (art).”

But, he cautioned, “when you make something that was scarce abundant, it’ll change people’s perceptions about its value.”

IMF proposes US Treasury official as second-in-command

IMF TRUMPED

By AFP
September 18, 2025


The appointment of the US Treasury Department's chief of staff to the IMF as its second-in-command would place a close confidant of Secretary Scott Bessent among the Fund's leadership

 - Copyright AFP ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS

The IMF has proposed appointing the US Treasury Department’s chief of staff as its new number-two official, the Washington-based lender said Thursday.

The selection of Dan Katz, which needs to be approved by the Fund’s executive board, would place a close confidant of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent among the top ranks of an organization that has faced criticism from President Donald Trump’s administration.

If Katz is approved, his work as first deputy managing director is expected to start October 6.

AFP reported on Katz’s expected selection earlier this week. He told AFP in a statement that he remains focused on his current Treasury role for now.

If approved, he will replace Gita Gopinath, who left the IMF in August to return to Harvard University.

Katz, who is chief of staff at the Treasury Department, was a senior official in the department during Trump’s first term as well.

A source familiar with the matter earlier told AFP that Katz has longstanding ties with Bessent and previously consulted for the Treasury chief’s hedge fund.

In announcing his proposed appointment, the IMF said Katz has been “the principal advisor to the (Treasury) Secretary on a wide range of domestic and international matters.”

“Mr. Katz was instrumental in developing the US government’s innovative economic partnership with Ukraine and has been central to the US government’s international negotiations, including with China,” the IMF added.

Katz has previously worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and is a graduate of Yale University.

IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said in a statement that Katz believes in “the important role of the Fund in helping our member countries ensure economic and financial stability at a time of significant transformations in the global economy.”

“His ability to build relationships with a wide range of interlocutors will be an important asset to the Fund,” she added.

In April, Bessent said on the sidelines of the IMF and World Bank’s spring meetings in Washington that both organizations need to be “made fit for purpose again,” suggesting they have strayed from their mandates.

The previous number-two official at the IMF, Gopinath, joined the Fund in 2019, becoming its first female chief economist.

She was promoted to first deputy managing director in 2022.

US small businesses slam Trump tariffs as legal fight proceeds


By AFP
September 18, 2025


Small business owners gathered in Washington to raise concern over US President Donald Trump's tariffs and their impact on companies - Copyright AFP Patrick T. Fallon

When businessman Travis McMaster shifted more manufacturing of his products out of China, and into India, he had sought to avoid growing tensions between Washington and Beijing.

“But I kind of outsmarted myself this time,” said McMaster, general manager at travel goods brand Cocoon USA.

Since August, US tariffs of 50 percent took effect on many Indian products, exceeding the additional 30-percent level imposed on Chinese goods this year.

He was among about 100 small business owners gathered in Washington on Thursday to detail how wide-ranging tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump recently have impacted their livelihoods.

Many spoke outside the Supreme Court, which is due to hear oral arguments on the legality of Trump’s global duties on November 5.

Since returning to the presidency in January, Trump has imposed sweeping 10-percent duties on almost all trading partners, alongside steeper levels on dozens of economies like the European Union and Vietnam.

But many small US firms say they have struggled to keep up with Trump’s fast-changing policies.

“We need to put a stop to these quick changes. Our business isn’t run on a whim, and our country shouldn’t (be) either,” McMaster, whose firm is based in Washington state, told reporters.

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in August affirmed a lower court’s finding that Trump had exceeded his authority in tapping emergency economic powers to impose sweeping duties on goods from various countries.

But the judges allowed these levies to stay in place through mid-October, allowing Trump to take the fight to the Supreme Court.

Small businesses said Thursday that in the meantime, they are feeling the pinch.

Michael Buechli, who sells curries and sauces from Thailand, said: “The tariffs that we have to pay now make it basically impossible to continue the business.”

Buechli has stopped ordering new products as tariffs have consumed his profit margins, and expects to go out of business if the situation persists.

Tiffany Williams, who runs a luggage store in Texas, called for more predictability in US trade policy.

“We’ve been asked to weather the short-term pain for the long-term gain,” she said. “But I’ve just had a hard time seeing exactly what the long term looks like.”

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

US regulator sues Ticketmaster over ‘illegal’ ticket schemes


By AFP
September 18, 2025


The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation over allegations it conspired to inflate ticket prices and deceive consumers with hidden fees - Copyright AFP Patrick T. Fallon

A top US regulator on Thursday sued Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation, alleging the ticketing giant conspired with brokers to inflate concert ticket prices and deceive consumers with hidden fees.

The Federal Trade Commission, along with seven states, filed the lawsuit in a California federal court, accusing the companies of allowing ticket brokers to harvest millions of tickets in violation of purchase limits, and then resell them at marked-up prices.

Ticketmaster has been the object of anger and frustration from both artists and spectators for decades, with concertgoers complaining about overpriced tickets, opaque pricing schemes, and glitches that saw sales for Taylor Swift’s historic Eras Tour, among others, marred by breakdowns.

Most recently, the reunion tour of UK rockers Oasis sparked furor in Britain when dynamic pricing caused ticket prices to jump to hundreds of pounds above face-value costs.

American live entertainment “should be accessible to all of us. It should not cost an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game,” said FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, citing President Donald Trump’s executive order to protect consumers from ticket pricing abuses.

The complaint alleges Ticketmaster, which controls about 80 percent of major concert venue ticketing in the United States, turned “a blind eye” to brokers who routinely exceeded ticket limits using thousands of fake accounts.

From 2019 to 2024, consumers spent more than $82.6 billion purchasing tickets from Ticketmaster, the FTC said.

According to the complaint, the regulator said internal documents show Ticketmaster even provided technological support to brokers through a software platform called TradeDesk, enabling them to manage tickets purchased across multiple accounts for easier resale.

The lawsuit also targets Ticketmaster’s pricing practices, alleging the company advertised ticket prices substantially lower than what consumers ultimately paid after mandatory fees and markups.

These hidden fees, which reached as high as 44 percent of ticket cost, totaled $16.4 billion from 2019-2024, the FTC said.

Ex-US climate envoy: Trump threatening ‘consensus science’ worldwide


By AFP
September 17, 2025


Climate scientists say that global warming drives extreme weather like storms, floods and heatwaves, making these disasters more frequent and intense. - © AFP LUIS TATO
Issam AHMED

President Donald Trump is leading the world “in the wrong direction” on climate and weaponizing clean energy as a culture-war issue, according to John Podesta, a longtime advisor to Democratic presidents.

Until January, Podesta was President Joe Biden’s senior point person on international climate policy. He took the stand Tuesday in Missoula, Montana, as an expert witness in Lighthiser v. Trump, a youth-led case challenging the administration’s fossil-fuel agenda.

Trump’s second term has seen sweeping rollbacks of domestic policy aimed at fighting climate change, and an effort to push fossil fuels abroad — from embedding liquefied natural gas (LNG) purchases in trade deals to reportedly pressuring bodies such as the International Energy Agency.

With COP30 talks in Brazil fast approaching, Podesta spoke to AFP in Missoula about America’s retreat from climate leadership — and what it means for the planet and US influence.

John Podesta, senior advisor to former president Joe Biden, says Trump is trying to erode global consensus on climate change – Copyright AFP/File SAUL LOEB

Q: How do you view the Trump administration’s international posture on climate?

Podesta: In the first term, they decided to abandon leadership. Now they’re trying to lead the world in the wrong direction. In international forums they’re trying to prevent climate action; in bilateral relationships they’re promoting fossil fuels, and in multilateral fora they’re showing disdain for any common action.

Q: There’s talk they could even try to weaken UN consensus on climate change. How much damage can they do?

Podesta: They’ll do all they can to tilt the field towards favoring fossil fuels. Their reasoning for going after science in the US will find its way into undermining the consensus science abroad. Whether they can actually change the dynamic at the IPCC (the UN climate science panel), particularly given they’re withdrawing resources from the IPCC and forbidding US federal scientists from participating in studies — I don’t think they’ll have much effect on the overall production of peer-reviewed science, but they’ll cause a little havoc along the way.

Q: How does this posture affect US standing in the world, especially against China’s push to dominate clean energy?

Podesta: It certainly reduces the sense of solidarity we have with countries that are not China. If we’re in a great competition with China for global leadership, we’re aligning with Russia and Saudi Arabia instead of with our natural allies in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. From a security posture, it’s a terrible mistake.

Q: What will all this mean for COP30 talks in Brazil?

Podesta: We’ll see this play out in Belem and beyond. There’s still strong global consensus to move forward, but with the US not just absent from leadership but playing a revisionist role, it empowers countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia that are trying to water down ambition — and now they have a strong ally in doing that.

Q: What do you think motivates Trump’s approach?

Podesta: It’s a mix of trying to turn clean energy into a culture-war issue while ignoring the real economics of the transition, and his fealty to fossil fuel interests that have funded his rise. But a lot of it is the politics of culture war — as long as he thinks it works for him, he’ll keep pursuing it.

Q: What differentiates the Lighthiser case from Juliana, a previous federal youth-led climate case, which you helped oppose when you were part of the Biden administration?

Podesta: I do think it’s different from Juliana because they’re seeking some specific remedies against direct harm that’s the result of actions taken by this administration. It’s showing in dramatic terms what taking these actions today builds in harms tomorrow, and that can only come through the voices of these young people, and I thought they were moving in the testimony they gave… It’s their future that’s at stake in this.

Australian state bans testing of illicit drugs

MORALISTIC ANTI SCIENCE IDEOLOGY THREATENS CITIZENS

The state’s health minister  said the government had a “zero-tolerance approach to illicit drugs”.  “There is no safe way to take drugs,” he said.

By AFP
September 18, 2025


Queensland ranks third-highest in Australia for drug use - Copyright AFP/File Sai Aung MAIN

The Australian state of Queensland has banned the testing of drugs for recreational use, sparking warnings from health providers on Friday that the move could put lives at risk.

Queensland ranks third-highest in Australia for drug use, the latest government data show, with around one in five people in the state reporting they had used in the past twelve months.

Late on Thursday, the government of the northeastern state said it would ban funding for testing which checks the chemical purity of drugs for users to see if they have been laced with other harmful substances.

The state’s health minister Tim Nicholls said the government had a “zero-tolerance approach to illicit drugs”.

“There is no safe way to take drugs,” he said. “Drug checking services send the wrong message to Queenslanders.”

Cameron Francis, chief executive of non-profit The Loop Australia, a testing service that operated in Queensland, told AFP he was “disappointed and saddened” by the decision.

“Without a service like pill testing, we have no idea what is circulating until it is too late,” he told AFP.

The Loop had run a government-funded year-long trial in the state and tested 1,200 drugs, he said.

Of those samples, one in seven drugs were disposed of after being tested, while one in three people were referred to other health services, Francis explained.

One in five people who participated said they would reduce their drug use in the future.

Australia’s drug market is becoming more dangerous with an increase of synthetic opioid drugs such as fentanyl, he warned.

Some 3.9 million people — around 18 percent of Australians aged 14 and over — used an illicit drug in the past year, official figures show.

Australian Medical Association state president Nick Yim said the move could spark a surge in hospitalisations in emergency departments, particularly during the upcoming summer festival season.

Official data show there were 1,635 drug-induced deaths across Australia in 2023 — the majority of which were considered accidental.

Queensland is the first Australian state to ban drug testing.

Some services or government-backed trials remain in place in the Australian Capital Territory as well as Victoria and New South Wales, home to the country’s largest cities of Melbourne and Sydney.

Testing kits can still be purchased online.

How did an Indian zoo get the world’s most endangered great ape?

“Trying to breed orangutans outside Indonesia with some kind of long-term hope that they are going to contribute to the population is just pure nonsense.”

By AFP
September 18, 2025


Vantara says it has 150,00 animals at its sprawling facility in India 

- Copyright AFP Idrees MOHAMMED

Sara HUSSEIN

Tapanuli orangutans are the world’s most endangered great ape. Fewer than 800 remain, all previously thought to be in their native Indonesia. But now an Indian zoo says it has one.

An Indian court cleared the 3,500-acre wildlife facility known as Vantara on Monday of allegations including unlawful acquisition of animals and financial wrongdoing.

But the decision is unlikely to quiet questions about how Vantara, which describes itself as a wildlife rehabilitation and conservation centre, has stocked its enclosures.

Vantara, run by Anant Ambani, the son of Asia’s richest man, says it houses 150,000 animals of 2,000 species, far exceeding populations at well-known zoos in New York, London or Berlin.

AFP spoke to seven experts on conservation and the wildlife trade to understand concerns about Vantara.

Several declined to speak on the record, citing Vantara’s previous legal actions against critics.

They called Vantara’s collection unprecedented.

“We’ve never seen anything on this scale,” said one longtime conservation expert from a wildlife protection group.

“It’s hoovering up animals from all over the world.”

Some of those acquisitions are more noteworthy than others, such as the single tapanuli that arrived in Vantara between 2023 and 2024, according to the facility’s submissions to India’s Central Zoo Authority.

Only officially described in 2017, tapanulis are incredibly rare, said Serge Wich, an orangutan specialist at Liverpool John Moores University.

They are confined to a small range in Indonesia and are in “dire straits” because of threats including mining and deforestation, he told AFP.



– ‘Surprised and shocked’ –



Trade in the world’s most endangered species is prohibited by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

But there are exceptions, including for “captive-bred” animals — individuals born in captivity to captive parents.

There is only one CITES record of a tapanuli orangutan ever being transferred internationally.

It left Indonesia in 2023, bound for the United Arab Emirates, where Vantara says its tapanuli came from.

The transfer record describes the animal as “captive-bred”.

However, multiple experts said that description was implausible.

“There are no captive breeding programmes for orangutans in Indonesia,” said Panut Hadisiswoyo, founder and chairman of the Orangutan Information Centre in Indonesia.

Only a handful are known to be in captivity at all, at rehabilitation facilities in Indonesia, he said.

A conservationist for more than two decades, Panut said he was “surprised and shocked” to learn from AFP about Vantara’s tapanuli orangutan.

“We do everything to protect them,” he said. “So it’s really, really distressing information.”

There is no information on where in Indonesia the animal originated. The country’s CITES authorities did not respond to a request for comment.

Experts said it was possible the orangutan is not a tapanuli at all. They look similar enough to Bornean and Sumatran orangutans that DNA testing would be needed for confirmation.

It could also be a mix of tapanuli and another species, perhaps discovered by a zoo in its collection — although experts questioned why a facility would hand off such a rare animal.

But if the animal is a tapanuli, “it’s almost inevitable that it would have to be illegal”, said orangutan conservation expert Erik Meijaard.

“It would be super sad.”



– ‘Pure nonsense’ –



Vantara did not respond to AFP’s request for comment on the orangutan and how it acquires animals.

The tapanuli is not the first highly endangered animal to arrive at Vantara.

Spix’s macaws, a vibrant blue species native to Brazil, were extinct in the wild until recently.

Brazil has sought to prevent all trade and transfer of the birds.

It allowed a breeding facility in Germany to acquire some on condition they would not be sold or moved without Brazilian permission, according to documents submitted to CITES.

Yet in 2023, 26 Spix’s macaws from the German facility arrived in Vantara.

Vantara says it is working “to ensure that the calls of these rare birds are never lost from their native habitats”.

The case has rankled Brazil, which raised it repeatedly at CITES meetings.

Asked about Vantara’s tapanuli, the CITES secretariat told AFP “this matter is under review”, adding it was “not in a position to provide information”.

In public documents, CITES has acknowledged receiving “multiple reports” about imports of endangered animals into India.

India has said it will invite CITES officials for a visit but has yet to provide “detailed information on the matter”, the secretariat noted.

If Vantara does own a single tapanuli orangutan, its conservation value would be limited, said Panut, who urged the animal’s return to Indonesia.

For Meijaard, conservation in their natural habitat in Indonesia provides “the only chance for this species’ survival”.

“Trying to breed orangutans outside Indonesia with some kind of long-term hope that they are going to contribute to the population is just pure nonsense.”

MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M

Deliveroo CEO to step down following DoorDash takeover


By AFP
September 18, 2025


Deliveroo has tens of thousands of self-employed riders -- a status that continues to cause controversy - Copyright AFP Lionel BONAVENTURE

Will Shu, founder of food delivery app Deliveroo, will step down as its chief executive once US rival DoorDash completes a takeover of the British group, a statement said Thursday.

DoorDash in May agreed to buy Deliveroo for £2.9 billion ($4 billion) in a deal expected to be completed at the start of October.

“Taking Deliveroo from being an idea to what it is today has been amazing,” Shu said in the statement.

“Today the company’s growth and profitability are accelerating and we are delivering on our mission to transform the way people shop and eat, but after 13 years I want to contemplate my next challenge,” the American added.

The DoorDash deal will create a delivery service present in more than 40 countries, serving around 50 million monthly-active users.

Deliveroo founder Will Shu said he wanted to ‘contemplate my next challenge’ as he steps down as CEO after 13 years – Copyright AFP JOSH EDELSON

Deliveroo posted its first annual profit in March following sizeable full-year losses owing to high investment costs since Shu founded the company.

The company’s initial public offering in 2021 had been London’s biggest stock market launch for a decade, valuing the group at £7.6 billion.

The offer from DoorDash is worth £1.80, less than half Deliveroo’s IPO price of £3.90.

Shu got the idea to start his own business after struggling to find restaurants that would deliver food to the London office where he often stayed late to work as a financial analyst.

Years after personally making Deliveroo’s first delivery in London, the company experienced a surge in demand during the Covid-19 pandemic from lockdown-hit customers.

However, increased competition saw it scale back global operations, most recently with an exit from Hong Kong.

San Francisco-based DoorDash, the largest food delivery app in the United States, entered the European market in 2021 with the purchase of Finland-based Wolt for $8.1 billion.

As big players in the gig economy, food delivery apps have faced controversy over the status of their self-employed riders.

In late 2023, the UK Supreme Court ruled that Deliveroo riders were not entitled to trade union rights such as collective bargaining.