helienne

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/m00…

We urgently need enforced disclosure of AI usage in TV shows & other media. These AI models use stolen work to displace human labour. It is reasonable to demand disclosures that let you avoid media made with them.

Ossoff: "Here's what's going to happen tonight: the world's most famous sore loser will deliver a prime-time presidential sour grapes address to pursue his 6-year-old grievances about the 2020 election, while his war in the Middle East spirals out of control and the cost of living continues to rise for Americans across the country. I expect the president to reheat debunked conspiracy theories about the repeatedly litigated and audited and confirmed 2020 presidential election in Georgia, an election that Donald Trump lost. And let me be very clear about this: if the President declares Georgia's election illegitimate, or if the President declares Georgia's sitting United States Senators illegitimate, he is declaring Georgia voters illegitimate. It's Donald Trump who tried to defraud Georgia voters in that election, Donald Trump who tried to commit election fraud when he called Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger -- and it was caught on tape, and you should play the tape to your viewers today -- and badgered and bullied Georgia's top election official to 'find him' the votes that he needed to win in a state where he had lost."

I resigned from Google DeepMind bc it broke its founding promise by selling AI to the military without restrictions against killer robots or mass spying. For months, I worked to stop this but watched powerful ethicists and institutions choose silence. Here's what happened. 🧵

A huge new class action lawsuit has been filed by big publishers and authors against Google over AI training. It opens: "Desperate to maintain its online dominance, Google abandoned its early motto of 'Don’t be evil' and engaged in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history." It alleges that Google: - took millions of books / articles provided to them for use only in Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar, and secretly used them to train LLMs - had internal discussions where they flagged that using books publishers had provided them for other purposes was "highly problematic for Google" and could lead to "$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines" - also trained on works from pirate sites & from behind paywalls - used all this to build an AI system that competes with the works Google copied

I agree with this. Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but Lindsay Graham was the leading driver of the devastating sanctions bill against Russia. Yesterday, he announced that president Trump agreed to it. He had just returned from Ukraine where it’s not unknown for Russian agents to operate. Russians are expert at administration of poisons that look like heart attacks. All tests should be done immediately to rule out foul play. I’ve seen enough Russian related suspicious deaths to know this is the only course of action

UK government's promise that Scottish AI data center would be powered 100% by renewable energy turns out to be “smoke and mirrors”. This is also the site the government promised would provide 3,400 jobs, a number that the simplest analysis suggests is a wild overestimate. AI data centers benefit AI companies, not local people. theguardian.com/technology/202…

NEW: Before cryptobillionaire Christopher Harborne gave £5m to @nigel_farage, he gave £1m to Boris Johnson. For what?? Today @nerve_news reveals new evidence that tracks Harborne's investments in defence firm QinetiQ...to key defence announcements from Boris Johnson. 1/

It’s been confirmed - Anthropic is pushing hard for the Australian government to legalise IP theft. This would be an outrageous thing to do. Generative AI competes with the people whose work it is trained on. Legalising the theft of creatives’ work would represent a huge transfer of value from struggling creatives to some of the biggest and most predatory companies in the world. Australians’ life’s work is not the government’s to give away.

Well, this is also fascinating. The responses to this thread are overwhelmingly dominated by Kremlin denialists. Clearly organised. Very reminiscent of peak Brexit years.

impossible to see this coming telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/…

Yesterday, the government published its ‘AI Adoption Plan’ for the creative industries. Somewhat incredibly, it says we should be pushing AI adoption before the government resolves the issues around copyright. This would be great for the AI industry, and terrible for creatives. Important for people to know what the government is pushing here. Short thread on its contents ⬇️ 1/n

The real two-tier scandal in the UK is the relentless double standard approach of a media which lets one party leader get away with financial dodgery that would drive them into a frenzy if it involved someone their billionaire owners didn’t want in power because they believed in things like fairness and equality

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, but not, apparently, for the music they use - other people's music - without which their models would not work. I know lots of musicians who will be upset. I am with them.

The BBC is now run by the man who rolled out this journalism-killing technology across Europe, the Middle East & Africa. It’s a trap. Opting out is a protest vote but Google’s AI summaries are news outlet serial killers that’ll get you either way

Hey OpenAI, when are you going to do what @sama told Congress was the right thing to do three years ago—to only use creative works to train AI models pursuant to freely & openly negotiated consent & fair compensation? How can an unfairly trained model ever be safe? @GaryMarcus

I feel very uncomfortable about the AI Security Institute, and this article by its creator, ex-PM Rishi Sunak, encapsulates why: He frames it as a way of avoiding regulating AI. He says this categorically. “If politicians are blithe about the risks [of AI], they will vote for those who favour regulation.” And he makes it clear he thinks regulation would be bad: “western governments shouldn’t restrict innovation in the race against China.” This is a man who now works for both Anthropic and Microsoft (not disclosed in the article). Evaluating the safety of AI models is good. But not in place of regulating the technology itself, and the companies behind it. Besides, as he points out, companies only give the AI Security Institute access to their models voluntarily. This means the UK government relies on good relations with big tech, which in turn makes it even less likely to regulate. It is far from clear how much the AI Security Institute has actually achieved with its astronomical public funding. What *is* clear, though, is that the people who set it up see it as a way of ensuring *less* regulation of AI companies, not more. This is very bad news.

Reading the Papal Encyclical again, it strikes me that not only is there no mention of the theft of creative work behind AI - there is no acknowledgement that pre-training data includes people’s creative work at all. This is an unfortunate omission. It mentions data several times, but mostly referring to things like health data and personal data. There is no recognition that the pre-training data on which much of the AI industry is built is people’s books, music and art. This reinforces a common misunderstanding of ‘training data’ as something anonymous, technical and obscure, when in fact it is people’s life’s work - their novels, their paintings, their songs. Readers of the encyclical who are new to AI will, I think, misunderstand what ‘training data’ actually is. This is a coup for the AI industry, which greatly benefits from rebranding ‘people’s creative work’ to ‘training data’, since the rebranding makes it less likely that governments will protect creators’ rights. It is hard to reconcile this omission with a letter that elsewhere, admirably, reiterates the need to “promote the dignity of every person”, and that says “justice concerns every phase of economic activity, [including] resource acquisition”. We must remember that training data is not ‘data’ in the sense most people understand it. It is the work of people - often highly creative work.

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it. Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying. Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence." Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter. They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created. One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility." Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies. That's the metered intelligence business model. And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

Scraping websites and having AI summarize them, so that no one visits the websites, is theft. Training AI on videos, so that it can make new videos that compete with them, is theft. We are witnessing the largest theft of creative work in history.

Politicians who boost AI do not represent the views of their constituents. New polling in the UK shows: - Most people think AI will destroy more jobs than it creates (57% v 17%) - 7 in 10 are worried about the economic impact of AI-driven job losses (3 in 10 very worried) - 1 in 5 think this will cause civil unrest (and 1 in 3 students) - Most people think companies will use savings to invest in more AI, not more people (59% v 15%) - 65% think AI’s economic benefits will flow mainly to wealthy investors and large companies (vs 13% who don’t) Full research from King’s College London here: preview-kcl.cloud.contensis.com/policy-institu…