Ed Newton-Rex
@ednewtonrex
CEO of Fairly Trained / Composer. Working towards fairer training data practices in generative AI.
Today is a huge win for creatives around the world, as Australia makes it clear it will not bow to pressure from AI companies to legalise the theft of creatives’ work. 🧵 1/3
Huge new class action lawsuit filed by big publishers and authors against Google this week over AI training. It accuses Google of taking millions of books / articles provided to them for use only in Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar, and secretly using them to train LLMs. 🧵 1/4
If the Australian Government accedes to Anthropic's demands and creates a copyright exception for AI training, the British Government should file a dispute at the WTO. www.afr.com/companies/in... 🧵 1/n
It's been almost a *year* since I flagged to their CEO that they were distributing copyrighted works that their co-founders seemed to have uploaded themselves. He said "Ok let us take a look and get back to you". 2/3
Hugging Face has just been sued for alleged copyright infringement for hosting & distributing copyrighted images, used for AI training. 🧵 1/3
🚨 AI companies are trying to use their vast, ill-gotten wealth to buy a change to the law in Australia. They say they will invest in data centers *if* the Australian government hands them the work of Australian creatives. This is a grotesque abuse of power. 🧵 1/3
🚨 Google continues to lobby the UK government to hand the work of the country's creatives to big tech companies for free. 🧵 1/3
After the Chair of the UK's Sovereign AI Fund called me a troll and blocked me, I'm pleased to hear that the UK government understands that I "would have found [his] tone abrupt or discourteous", and that they "have discussed this with Mr Wise". 🧵 1/6
RouteNote, a platform that lets you distribute your music to Spotify etc., is automatically opting its users into an AI licensing deal with Meta. They say “This is your choice”, and give you 14 days to opt out - but lots of users will miss this email & therefore miss the chance to opt out. 🧵 1/2
And YouTube just claimed in court documents that it has the right to train AI on any music you've uploaded to YouTube. So don't assume your music isn't being used for AI training just because it doesn't happen to show up in the Atlantic's search. /end
Suno, for example, publicly admitted in court documents that it has trained on "tens of millions of recordings" - and there is no indication the Atlantic's list corresponds to what Suno used. 2/3
The Atlantic just released a tool that lets you see if your music has been scraped for AI training. Recordings I sang on in King's College Choir are in there. So is the music of millions of other musicians. Check it here: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
99 authors just sued Anthropic, accusing them of pirating books to train AI. The lawsuit also names 2 Anthropic founders: Dario Amodei & Ben Mann. (It is established fact that Anthropic downloaded millions of pirated books, & that Ben Mann personally did some of this.) The lawsuits keep coming.
2 months ago, the UK's Sovereign AI Fund announced that it was giving Odyssey taxpayer-funded compute. Today, Odyssey raised $310 million. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think we should be diverting UK taxpayers' money to US-headquartered AI companies... 🧵 1/2
Meta tried to dismiss a lawsuit that claims they torrented 1000s of adult films for AI training. The motion to dismiss was just denied; judge said “Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that Defendant is liable for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement”.
Tried out the UK government’s official new AI chatbot for jobseekers. Its advice: work in the US. Quick, which public service can we add AI to next
why does the uk government's 'ai jobcentre in your pocket' output copyrighted song lyrics? has it been trained on them?
Oh good, another MoU between the UK government and an AI company being sued for alleged copyright infringement
Anthropic implying they are one of the more cautious AI companies, when to get where they are today they pirated millions of books 🤷♂️
Suno - a company that trained on "essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet", and argues it does not need to pay to do so - is now valued at $5.4 billion. They will pay for GPUs, and for engineers… 🧵 1/2
Anthropic’s $580 million Series B in 2022 was led by Sam Bankman-Fried. Their AI models at the time were trained on pirated books. That they are considered ‘the good guys’ says a lot about the AI industry.
The UK gov keeps dodging the question they are being repeatedly asked about the Sovereign AI Fund - whether it will invest in companies that train on copyrighted work without a licence (including if they do so abroad). Today's example, asked by Baroness Kidron, with a non-answer from gov: 🧵 1/2
Universal & Sony just asked permission from the court to add more than 61,000 songs to their copyright lawsuit against Suno. At the statutory $150k per work, that could make Suno’s maximum potential damages, if they lose the case, over $9 billion. www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/umg-and-sony...
Wes Streeting’s rapid response to Tony Blair seems to have been so rapid because it was written by AI. UK politics is being written by ChatGPT. What are we doing here? Our politicians should not be delegating their debates to an American chatbot. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Strong signs that >50% of Clive Lewis MP's Guardian article today was written by AI. That's according to Pangram, which has a very low false positive rate (1 in 10,000). This would contravene the @theguardian.com's AI policy if so.
It’s no longer just AI companies & their founders being sued over AI training - individual researchers are now being sued, too. In a new lawsuit, two authors allege that Guillaume Lample, while an AI researcher at Meta, torrented 70 terabytes of pirated books… 1/2
I submitted an FOI request, and found out that the UK's Sovereign AI Fund doesn't check whether the companies it backs adhere to copyright law. Sov AI's Chair has said publicly that they will "only invest in companies that follow [copyright law]" - but we now know they don't check this. 🧵 1/6
AI music company Suno has just been sued again. A duo of multi-instrumentalists called The American Dollar says Suno (i) trained on their music and (ii) has caused an 80% drop in their licensing revenue. They accuse Suno of “massive and ongoing infringement”.
If you want to support an artist who took the fight to AI companies, consider supporting Kelly McKernan. They lost a ton of income after AI companies trained on their work without permission. So they fought back... 🧵 1/2 www.kickstarter.com/projects/kel...