Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named one of LinkedIn’s “Top Voice in Technology,” he covers tech and business for Good Day New York, is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular daily business blog. He's a bestselling author, and the creator of the popular, free online course, Generative AI for Execs. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com or subscribe to our daily email http://ow.ly/WsHcb

Specialties: Subject matter expert AI, technology, media & entertainment, award-winning composer/producer, television producer, writer, director, special expertise in advertising and marketing. http://www.shellypalmer.com

Stanford and Yale researchers extracted 95.8% of a copyrighted novel, word for word, from Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Gemini 2.5 Pro gave up 76.8% of Harry Potter without even requiring a jailbreak. Grok 3 handed over 70.3%. GPT-4.1 was the most resistant at 4.0%, but it still coughed up text after enough attempts. Thirteen books were tested. The words came out.

This was pure memory extraction. No search agents, no RAG pipelines, no web browsing. The researchers used probing and iterative continuation prompts against the production models. The text lives inside the parameters themselves, encoded during training and retrievable with sufficient effort.

Google told the U.S. Copyright Office in 2023 that “there is no copy of the training data, whether text, images, or other formats, present in the model itself.” What is a 76.8% verbatim reproduction of Harry Potter? You can call it learned patterns, statistical relationships, or compressed representations. It’s not a copy, at least not a complete one, but when a system reproduces three-quarters of a novel on request, the semantic distinction between “learned from” and “stored” becomes a tryable issue of fact.

Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit where the court found that storing pirated works was “inherently, irredeemably infringing.” A German court ruled in November 2025 that OpenAI infringed copyright because its model memorized song lyrics. A. Feder Cooper, the Yale co-author, said it plainly: “It was a surprise that they could memorize entire texts” despite guardrails.

The study was published January 6, 2026. I haven’t seen a lawsuit based on it yet, but if this research proves to be accurate, massive lawsuits are sure to follow.

Shelly Palmer

Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University

A new study published in Harvard Business Review confirms what every high-performer already suspects: AI tools don’t reduce work, they intensify it. Researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye spent eight months studying a 200-person tech company and found that employees who adopted AI worked faster, took on more tasks, and extended their hours, all without being asked. We did not need a study to confirm that productivity tools increase productivity. Still, this one is worth a quick read.

They buried the most interesting finding in the middle of the article. Friction points (waiting for a colleague, staring at a blank page, struggling with an unfamiliar task) create natural rest periods for knowledge workers. When AI eliminates them, the boundary between working and not working becomes trivially easy to cross. The pause disappears, and the work expands to fill every available minute.

The researchers mapped an obvious escalation cycle. AI made tasks faster, which raised expectations for speed, which increased dependence on AI, which expanded the scope of what workers attempted, which increased the total volume of work. One engineer put it plainly: “You had thought that maybe because you could be more productive with AI, you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”

Every productivity tool in history has punished the people willing to sprint. Spreadsheets punished the fastest accountants. Email punished the most responsive managers. AI just removed the speed limit. Your best people will hit the wall first, because they are the ones running the hardest. If your AI deployment strategy does not include guardrails for pacing, you are optimizing for burnout.

Burger King is rolling out an AI platform called “BK Assistant” with a voice assistant named Patty. Patty takes drive-thru orders, monitors restaurant operations, and notifies managers when equipment needs maintenance or products run low. Every U.S. Burger King will have one by the end of 2026. Sounds reasonable, except…

Patty also evaluates whether employees are being “friendly.” The AI monitors conversations for phrases like “please” and “thank you,” analyzes tone, and scores worker interactions. A companion feature called “Employee Assist” provides real-time coaching and evaluates staff behavior. Burger King COO Peter Perdue framed this as making “team member and manager’s roles easier.” A machine that listens to every word a minimum-wage worker says and grades their enthusiasm isn’t a synthetic training aid; it’s a workplace surveillance system named after a hamburger.

I’m going to let you think about the Orwellian aspects of this decision on your own. It would be a fun academic debate (if this weren’t actually happening to actual human beings). My question: what happens next? It’s clear that managers are not needed. An AI platform that listens to every word and watches each flame-broiled moment in the restaurant will have a better understanding (sorry, better patternmatching) than a human manager. No ego, no favoritism, just an “always on” management rubric that humans must follow. If you want to channel your inner Agent Smith (sorry for mixing sci-fi metaphors), you can imagine a future Burger King run by AI lording over the smallest possible number of low-paid human workers. That’s not exactly having it your way.

Excited to be speaking at POSSIBLE 2026 this April.

If you're thinking  about where marketing, media, and technology are headed, this is the room to be in. Learn more and get your ticket below.

#POSSIBLE2026 #Marketing #AI #FutureOfMedia

Open article: POSSIBLE Miami Marketing Conference & Expo | April 28-30, 2025 by possibleevent.com

POSSIBLE Miami Marketing Conference & Expo | April 28-30, 2025

Google yesterday launched Nano Banana 2, the consumer brand for Gemini 3.1 Flash Image. The upgrade includes sub-second 4K image synthesis across multiple aspect ratios, character consistency for up to five characters, fidelity for up to 14 objects in a single workflow, and precise text rendering accurate enough for marketing mockups and greeting cards. The images all carry SynthID watermarks.

Nano Banana 2 is available through the Gemini API, Gemini CLI, Vertex API, AI Studio, and Antigravity, and it’s also the default image generator in Search results via Google Lens and AI Mode across 141 countries. This makes it ambient, like spell check or autofill for billions of users.

A year ago, AI image generators couldn’t render legible text on a birthday card. Today, they’re producing print-ready marketing assets with brand-consistent characters at sub-second speeds. Stock photography libraries, product shot studios, and social media content farms all sell labor that Nano Banana 2 gives away for free. Some will call it AI Slop, others will call it AI Candy, and still others will recognize it for what it is: the next generation of imaging tools.

I did not mourn the loss of my Rapidograph pen, my non-repo blue pencil, my single-edge razor blades, my red-coat “cake opaque,” or my roll of Rubylith. If you don’t know what these things are, it’s because the personal computer ended the need for them (for paste-up and pre-press) decades ago. Every single person who wanted to keep working in an art department learned to do the job with a new, digital co-worker (mostly Mac, but occasionally a PC).

An early preview of WebMCP, a standard co-authored by Google and Microsoft that makes it easy for agents to navigate websites, is now available in Chrome 146. This feature was added so quietly last week that a lot of people missed it.

Previously, AI browser agents guessed which elements to click by scraping HTML or analyzing screenshots. It's a pretty fragile approach to the agentic web. WebMCP replaces that guessing with a structured Tool Contract. The website declares "this button calls buyTicket(destination, date)" and the AI calls the function directly, cutting token costs by 89%.

Wondering if WebMCP is similar to MCP? They are complementary. Anthropic's MCP (Model Context Protocol) handles server-side tool connections, while WebMCP handles the browser. Together, they create the infrastructure for agents to interact with both backend systems and frontend interfaces. The spec is moving through W3C, with formal browser announcements expected by mid-2026 at Google I/O.

Chrome and Edge own almost 75 percent of global browsers, so WebMCP has "the" built-in audience. When officially launched, this will be the biggest technical shift in SEO since structured data.

We've been talking about marketing to bots for the past year or so. The infrastructure to optimize for agentic commerce is almost here. Get ready.

Cohere, the $5.5 billion Toronto-based AI company, just launched Tiny Aya: an open-source family of models that supports 70+ languages and runs entirely offline on devices. No cloud required. No API fees. While OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic fight over who can build the biggest brain, Cohere went small and wide.

Roughly 1.5 billion people speak English as a first or second language. The other five-ish billion do not, and most lack reliable broadband. Current AI models, including GPT-4, degrade noticeably outside English and a handful of European languages. Cohere is targeting the markets that got skipped: remote clinics in sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural systems in Southeast Asia, local commerce across Latin America. Offline-first means these models can actually reach them.

Whether “70+ languages” is a genuine capability or a marketing number remains to be seen. GPT-4 claims multilingual support too, but performance in Yoruba or Bengali tells a different story. Google has Gemini Nano, Microsoft has Phi, and Meta keeps iterating on Llama, but none of them have packaged this many languages in a lightweight offline format. The enterprise AI market is projected to hit $150 billion by 2027, and most of that revenue will come from outside the United States. Cohere just built an interesting on-ramp.

Google Labs just launched Pomelli Photoshoot, a free tool that turns any product photo into a professional studio or lifestyle shot. Pick a product image, choose a template, generate, and refine. The tool applies your brand’s visual identity (what Google calls “Business DNA”) to keep everything on-brand across campaigns. The target audience is small and medium-sized businesses that cannot afford professional product photography. I tested it. It works as described.

Yesterday I wrote about the introduction of Google’s Lyria 3 in the context of production music. Today, we’re looking at Pomelli in the context of product photography. Both AI systems are capable of delivering functional content created under pressure that serves a defined purpose. I call it “required creative.” (This is opposed to “inspired creative,” which lives in the metaphysical realm of human emotion, skill, and desire.) Product photography for an e-commerce listing needs to look professional and move inventory. It does not need Annie Leibovitz. Microsoft proved this last year with its Surface commercial, which was largely AI-generated and went unnoticed for three months while delivering a 90% reduction in time and cost.

“I only have $10,000 in the budget for this,” said the producer while negotiating $50,000 worth of work. Commercial production is a factory business. The client sets the price. Content creators live or die based on production efficiency (productivity). Using technology to eek out every ounce of margin you can is a best practice for production companies. I should know; I’ve owned a production company for 45 years.

You may love Pomelli and Lyria 3, or you may hate them. You may love or hate what they stand for, or you may have big feelings about the quality of their outputs. You are fully entitled to feel however you want to feel about this, but don’t think for a second that these capabilities will be rejected by SMBs or by professional production organizations for all but the very lowest-end work. Quite conversely: the adventure is just beginning.

My essay from yesterday continues to refine a concept I've been developing called "share of prompt."

It's a three-layer measurement framework that connects AI answer engine visibility directly to revenue. Every major analytics platform shipped AI visibility tools in 2025.

None of them can definitively tell you what an AI-generated brand mention is worth.

If your team is tracking whether ChatGPT mentions your brand (and you should be), the next question is whether you can tie that visibility to conversions and compare the unit economics against your paid search spend. 

That's the gap this framework is designed to close. -s

https://lnkd.in/epTY9_yK

The Claude Exit Tax - If you’ve spent this weekend scrambling your engineering teams, you already know the news. In an unprecedented move, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced he is directing DoD to designate Anthropic a “Supply Chain Risk to National Security.” This is a radioactive tag historically reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei or Kaspersky. If your organization (or any company you do business with) does business with the U.S. military or federal government, based on the available information, using Claude is now a serious compliance escalation for any DoD-linked work.

Let’s leave politics and patriotism out of the discussion and spend a minute going over what you need to do now and what you need to be ready to do to protect your AI tech stack from future disruption. Read more - link in the comments below.

Healthcare is at an inflection point, and AI is no longer a future concept. It’s a leadership imperative.

I’m honored to serve as the keynote speaker for the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Future of Healthcare Symposium, where we’ll explore how AI is reshaping healthcare far beyond technology -- into decision-making, ethics, workforce strategy, and leadership itself.

Pepperdine Graziadio has intentionally infused AI across their programs as a tool for critical thinkers and purpose-driven leaders. The focus is clear:

➡️ How leaders think with AI
➡️ How they use it responsibly
➡️ How they lead humans through change

If you care about the future of healthcare, leadership, and responsible AI, join the conversation in Malibu on March 12.

Register now at bit.ly/FutureofHC26. The first 50 registrants to use code SHELLY26 will receive a complimentary pass.

#GraziadioHealth #AI #FutureOfHealthcare #Leadership #PepperdineGraziadio #StrategicInnovation #TechTrends

Google DeepMind just launched Lyria 3 in the Gemini app. Type a text prompt (or upload a photo) and you will get a 30-second track with auto-generated lyrics, vocals, and custom cover art. The model is available in eight languages to anyone 18+. YouTube creators worldwide can also access it through Dream Track for Shorts soundtracks. Every track carries a SynthID watermark.

The instrumentals are impressive and can pass for production music: the kind of tracks that underscore voiceovers and get buried under sound effects in corporate videos, podcasts, and social content. The vocals are less convincing and land in the uncanny valley. The 30-second cap is just long enough to make the output useful.

This is still a parlor trick – a very good parlor trick – but a parlor trick nonetheless. A year ago, AI-generated music sounded like a MIDI file having a seizure. Today, Lyria 3 produces tracks with realistic sonority, genre-appropriate arrangements, and coherent song structure. The rate of improvement is mind-boggling. If you extrapolate the quality gains of the past 12 months, the gap between AI-generated music and professional production narrows to a sliver by early next year.

The near-term impact lands squarely on production music, which is a billion dollar market filled with tracks designed to be heard but not listened to. Lyria 3 (and its competitors) can generate this kind of output right now. If you are licensing stock music, Lyria 3 offers an interesting new workflow. The longer-term implications depend on how fast the tracks clear the uncanny valley and how the licensing landscape evolves.

As always, your thoughts and comments are both welcome and encouraged, but please don’t write to tell me that AI will “never” replace human musicians or artists or writers or engineers or composers, etc. I get it. AI is a massive threat and, at the moment, it sucks. On this we can all agree. But remember: we live on the exponential and today AI is the worst it will ever be.

I was happy to return to Amdocs’ The Great Indoors podcast with Matthew Roberts. We spoke about the brutal reality of the media business, where traditional purchase funnels have collapsed as consumers shift toward short-form video and zero-click AI environments, as well as the rise of vibe coding, where conceptual clarity becomes the new fluency.

Listen now if you want to hear about the race for AGI and how to maintain human accountability in an increasingly optimized world:

https://lnkd.in/eZNfZSW5

#VibeCoding #MediaDisruption #TheGreatIndoors

This isn’t an AI race anymore.
It’s a distribution story, and Google is already everywhere.

Google’s Gemini app now has more than 750 million MAUs (monthly active users), up from 650 million before the Gemini 3 launch in mid-November. CEO Sundar Pichai said Gemini 3 Pro “has seen the fastest adoption of any model in our history.”

A 100 million user increase in three months is impressive, but the comparison to ChatGPT requires a footnote. OpenAI reports weekly active users (nearing 900 million, per The Information in December), while Google reports MAUs. These are not the same metric. MAUs include people who opened the app once. Weekly active users suggest habitual use. Google is catching up, but the gap may be wider than the headlines suggest.

As fun as this press release is, it misses the point. Gemini lives inside Chrome, Android, Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Docs. Apple announced that Google will be its “preferred Cloud provider” to develop the next generation of Apple Foundation Models, based on Gemini technology, to power a revamped Siri later this year. Samsung is doubling its Gemini-powered devices to 800 million units in 2026.

OpenAI has ChatGPT powering itself and some of the Copilot-branded Microsoft products. Putting a fine point on it, Gemini now reaches billions of users and devices across Google’s ecosystem and its partners. This is no longer a race. Google is the winner.

Google is projecting capital expenditures of $175 to $185 billion in 2026 (essentially double what it spent last year) with the majority going to AI infrastructure. The AI assistant market is consolidating around two serious players: Google and OpenAI. One has a path to profitability, the other… not so much. As for Anthropic? Claude serves a different market and has a different business model.

Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, co-founder of Metacademy, and the CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named LinkedIn’s “Top Voice in Technology,” he covers tech and business for Good Day New York, is a regular commentator on CNN and CNBC and writes a popular daily business blog. He’s the Co-Host of the award-winning podcast Techstream with Shelly Palmer & Seth Everett and his latest book, Blockchain - Cryptocurrency, NFTs & Smart Contracts: An executive guide to the world of decentralized finance, is an Amazon #1 Bestseller. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com or subscribe to our daily email http://ow.ly/WsHcb

Specialties: Subject matter expert technology, media & entertainment, award-winning composer/producer, television producer, writer, director, special expertise in advertising and marketing. http://www.shellypalmer.com

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