Stars and bars, doomscrolling AI style, and a ballooning anti-encryption argument

Daily Mail's digital leap, Threads are in full swing, and a नहीं from Bollywood - all in this week's Content Aware.

Published: 15:11, 02 October 2025

Corbidge comments on...the cavalry might be coming 
GenAI is trying to bully the movie industry just as it has with publishing, under the same blether of "It's all about national security, guys!". As OpenAI announced to Hollywood that its believes all its work and people are fair game for new video app Sora, our resident star of soldered screen Rob looks at whether the star power and clout of global stars demanding a bar on theft of their likeness and work could do more for the rights of content owners than a thousand op-eds and industry talks.
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OpenAI's "TikTok of slop"
As Corbidge writes, OpenAI is working on a standalone app for Sora 2, its next-gen video model. It's an attempt to meld GenAI capabilities with social media use and create a TikTok rival. Think infinite swipeable 10-second clips, but all AI. But now comes the weird part. If you want to use the app, you reportedly need to verify your identity via facial recognition, enabling your likeness to be used by the app and, err... other users. OpenAI says there will be filters to stop copyright violations and NSFW content, thought early Sora tests didn't appear to nail that part.
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EU to Big Tech: No free pass
Brussels is turning up the heat on Big Tech's AI. In a letter to EU lawmakers, Tech Commissioner Henna Virkkunen warned that AI buried under the hood of social media platforms still has to respect any overarching EU AI rules and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and users need to be able to opt-out of embedded AI. The message from Brussels? AI through the side door will get the same stop and search as AI through the front.
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Bot war being lost
Publishers are awake to blocking bots to protect their content and reduce runaway infrastructure costs, but how are other non-media businesses doing? Terribly. Research by bot security specialists Datadome shows that a measly 2.8% of business websites are fully protected against bot traffic doing who knows what. That's actually a significant decrease in a year, from 8.4%, which Datadome blames on bots proliferating quickly, and previously protected sites being unable to tell more advanced AI bots from people. If they are just scanning your site for shopping or search results, maybe that's a trade off, but in fact 64% of AI bot traffic reached forms pages, 23% burrowed their way to login pages, and 5% got all the way to checkout flows, all signs associated with fraud vectors, account takeover, and compliance risk. They really are coming for you.
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Daily Mail & Glide CMS: less legacy systems, more bold moves
When it comes to precision and adaptability, they are essential in digital publishing but also rarely easy to achieve together. In this case study, discover how the Daily Mail, one of the world's most iconic news brands, overcame the constraints of legacy systems to launch Mail+ Editions, its dynamic digital subscription product.
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Google News Sandbox: 28 days of silence
Have you performed a flawless domain migration but still saw your Google News traffic flatline? Despite great care over sitemaps, structured data, and indexing, it was all pancake for a month until it snapped back to life? There may be an explanation in the "them, not you" category, based on migrated sites being sent to a Google Sandbox. No workaround as yet, but see if the post below rings a bell.
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Lights, camera, legal action!
Bollywood is echoing its west coast US namesake after movie power couple Abhishek Bachachan and Aishwarya Rai set YouTube and AI image hijacking in their sights. Their legal argument? Deepfakes not only infringe on their rights, but are also being used to train other AI models which will perpetuate future losses. Sounds like a familiar story publishers will recognise. India is one of YouTube's crown jewel markets. With cumulatively tens of millions of social media followers and considerable influence within the Indian film industry, it would not be surprising to see the pair followed by others.
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Creators shake up the news game
As the media world stirs awake and notices the spotlight shifting to independent creators, INMA Dublin offers a much needed reality check: creators aren't just competitors, they're a welcome mirror showing publishers how to genuinely connect with the audience in the AI age, especially Gen Z. It is time to collaborate, ramp up the authenticity, and test new formats none of your mature audiences yet go near.
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Reclaim the web from AI
The father of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, says it has gone from open innovation to closed data harvesting and digital addiction by design. He slammed gatekeepers for hijacking his invention and warned that AI will make things worse. His proffered fix is Solid, a project which gives users control of their data and steers the web back into its original purpose. There is no time to wait on governments, Berners-Lee says, demanding public-minded innovation over profit-driven ownership. He says it's not too late but the clock is ticking.
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Play safe or pay up
California just dropped a new AI law, and big players such as Meta, OpenAI, and Google aren't happy about it. SB 53 demands these giants spill the beans on their safety protocols and report any AI screw ups, including those that happen without a human in the loop. Some tech firms are crying "stifling!", while some such as Anthropic are giving it a thumbs up.
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Disney uses the force on chatbots
The House of Mouse has entered the chat with a cease and desist letter to Character.AI, accusing the platform of letting users roleplay with unauthorised versions of its IP, including Pixar Pals, Marvel Heroes, and Jedi Legends. Not even Yoda is safe. Character.AI, already in hot water over past safety failures, quickly pulled the plug and played nice. If there was any doubt of the outcome, reminder that wags have described Disney as a law firm that makes movies - touch their IP at your peril.
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Sold out seats, but still half empty
Google’s ad empire is under fire again, not for what it does but for what it doesn’t do. It turns out that publishers are only allowed to sell the ad space Google thinks they’ll have, not their actual traffic. It’s called “avails” and it’s like selling seats on a plane based on the last month’s passenger average, not how many are boarding today. Editors are fuming and revenue vanishing, while Google preaches its standard “trust us” hymn. Is it time to break up the ad box? Ricky Sutton shares his thoughts.
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Threads pulls ahead
As Threads creeps up on X in daily users, it seems that the “Twitter killer” might finally be living up to the hype with figures pointing to 115 million daily app users and rising. X may still rule the web browser but Threads is definitely threading the needle, one scroll at a time. Are your writers and comms teams still crawling the corridors of X to the exclusion of everywhere else?
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AI deals multiply and divide
Who could have seen it coming: publishers with OpenAI deals enjoy ChatGPT click-throughs nearly seven times higher than those without deals. Another catch? These partnerships mostly favour big, English-language players, while smaller and non-English outlets are left in the dust. It’s fuelling arguments of a gatekeeper game, where closed-door decisions deem future viability based on handshakes. As many predict AI Chatbots will in future edge out traditional search, critics fear this type of deal-making threatens to narrow media’s voice and footprint to only approved partners.
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The spy in your pocket
The EU is laying out laws to force scanning of all messages in any chat apps, in the name of fighting crime. Plenty are sounding alarms that client-side scanning would punch holes in encryption, violate GDPR, and present the most appealing of doors to hackers and rival states. Unsurprisingly it is proving highly divisive down political, demographic, and national lines. It is due for vote on the 14th of October.
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