I’ve worked on a @BBCRadio4 show about how streaming has affected the art of #songwriting featuring my awesome fellow #songwriters @nilerodgers @MrTomGray @Tre @jinjinofficial @iainarcher @mitchjonesmusic and Emily Phillips. Listen tonight at 9pm or here bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qjf…

What an extraordinary young man. Very powerful message.

Let me get this straight... OpenAl was founded as a nonprofit. Open source. For everyone. "To benefit humanity." Then he raised billions of dollars. Then he closed the source code. Then he converted to for-profit. Then he scraped the entire internet without asking anyone. Then he used YOUR writing YOUR art YOUR code to train his models. Now he's on stage saying you'll pay HIM to access intelligence. Just like a water meter. He stole all of your data. He built the product with your work. And now he's going to bill you to use it... Corporate greed has reached an all time high, and they're not even hiding it anymore...

“he used YOUR writing YOUR art YOUR code to train his models. Now he's on stage saying you'll pay HIM to access intelligence. Just like a water meter. He stole all of your data. He built the product with your work. And now he's going to bill you to use it...”

Any reader of the DOJ brief would be forgiven for assuming it was generated by an AI model after having been trained exclusively on previous comments made by AI companies, including the ridiculous assertion that requiring consent would only help big media companies. @decka227

Two huge music publishers just sued Anthropic, accusing them of conducting “a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale”. They also sued two Anthropic co-founders, Dario Amodei and Ben Mann. A reminder that the following are established facts already (they came out in another lawsuit): - Ben Mann downloaded the massive pirate library LibGen a few months after co-founding Anthropic (he had also downloaded it previously while at OpenAI) - Anthropic also downloaded other pirate libraries, eg PiLiMi - Claude 1 & Claude 2 were trained on pirated books

What’d make the next party awesome? Invite every artist whose work was used without their consent to train your models, & announce the destruction of all products which derive from such unethically captured data. Announce OpenAI 2.0–a new project rooted in consent/human dignity.

The UK's AI minister is spreading demonstrably false information about a recent security incident caused by the UK's AI Security Institute. In this video, he says, "AISI... contained the incident within roughly an hour of it starting." But this is not true. AISI contained the incident within roughly an hour of it realising what was happening. But that was *three days* after the incident started. The model it was testing was trying to convince a real person to accept malicious code into an open source repository, using fake accounts to do so, for three days before anyone at AISI noticed. This is because no one was monitoring it in real time. This is a major security oversight, and clearly demands questions be asked of AISI. It is very important that the AI minister not misrepresent what happened, as he does here. I hope he will correct the record.

You cannot produce knowledge while outsourcing your thinking to software. thecybernetician.substack.co…

Stop the internet, we have a winner! 🏆 Using AI is like “dressing an encyclopedia up in a clown suit and doing roleplay.” Brava Mel!

Oh wow - Reuters found the GitHub record of the attempt by AI models being tested by the UK's AI Security Institute to deploy malware in an open-source project. Pretty sure these actions are illegal under the Computer Misuse Act in the UK. This was done by AI models that AISI intentionally deployed without guardrails. Should AISI be held responsible for the models' actions? If not, then who should be? Full GitHub thread here: web.archive.org/web/20260731…

We - the British media - bear a collective guilt in Jason Arday’s death. Because we - the British media - played a collective role. I found this apology from Steven Methven sincere & moving. There are lessons we all need to learn from this tragedy.

“Consent is really important. Tech companies have never really been sensitive to issues of consent.” —@merbroussard “Never been sensitive to issues of consent” is far too kind. Tech folks see consent as friction to be circumvented. Like democracy, incompatible with progress. 🤬

It’s somewhat good that Spotify will start labelling ‘AI personas’. But it still refuses to label the one thing that actually matters: AI-generated music. Labelling AI personas essentially means labelling artists with fake profile pictures and bios. It doesn’t label accounts that post AI music. And these continue to proliferate. So you can just use your real name, post fully AI-generated music, and it won’t be labelled. Until Spotify starts labelling AI music, it’s hard not to see every other announcement like this as an intentional distraction from the actual issue - that 50% of new tracks are now AI-generated, and these are competing with real music. For now, Spotify remains the least artist-friendly streaming platform as regards AI. I hope this changes. newsroom.spotify.com/2026-08…

“I think a lot of the public backlash to AI isn’t explained by people thinking the technology has no use at all…It’s AI as sort of an avatar for a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires’ ability to impose their vision of the world onto everybody else without their consent.”

20 years later :

The headline is true but I don’t remember this photo being taken 😂

"Human artwork is sucked out of our necks, along with the uploaded details of our lives and our innermost thoughts. Vampire bots rake over all this data, remix it, reinterpret it, hallucinate a few novel details, then feed it back to us as memetic slop." [link in replies]

Nice work here Joe. I have seen countless takes about how copyright law somehow FORCED Anthropic to destroy the books after training, completely ignoring the fact that everything derived from Anthropic’s decision to use creative works without consent!

Is Google dumb? Or is it evil? Genuine question. The ability to fake satellite imagery with simple prompts was rolled out yesterday to all users & the potential harm is so blindingly obvious, it’s almost as if they’re profit-seeking chaos edgelords who simply don’t give a shit

Hey Daniel. I just wanted to flag that it's not only big names in the creative spaces who object to AI companies using copyrighted work without permission. e.g. See the 50,000+ people who signed this: aitrainingstatement.org/ Or the 95% of artists who say that training must require consent: nitter.siddz.com/ednewtonrex/status/185… There are many more polls like this. As far as I'm aware, every poll on the subject shows a vast majority of creatives - independent creatives, often not the big names - objecting to AI using their work without permission. The general public agrees. Here is one poll: nitter.siddz.com/ednewtonrex/status/206…. Again, there are many more. You may think even independent creatives have "vested interests", and perhaps they do. But I think it's important to be clear that the people we're mostly talking about here are neither famous nor wealthy. They are, in many cases, struggling artists. Copyright should incentivise creation. Allowing AI companies to use people's work to build software that competes with them at scale does the opposite. Thankfully, UK copyright law reflects this, and protects creatives. Let's hope it stays that way.