Jacob Croft

I've wiped the slate clean and moved to greener pastures. I may still RT stuff here but it would mean a lot if you followed me elsewhere as I won't be very active here any more 🙏

@ednewtonrex @JOSourcing This is huge, I was convinced after they (seemingly) ignored the consultation that they'd made their decision already and we're just jumping through hoops as a formality with no actual intention to change course

Fantastic news in the UK today - the government has apparently ditched its plan to force creatives to 'opt out' if they don't want AI companies training on their life's work. The opt-out proposal was unfair and unworkable. Many couldn't realistically have opted out at all, and it would have affected small rights holders disproportionately negatively. We should be grateful to the government for listening to reason on this, rather than just listening to the big tech lobby. They have done the right thing by putting opt-out behind us. They should now reaffirm what the law says - that AI companies must license people's work if they want to train on it - and commit not to change that law. thetimes.com/uk/technology-…

@SciTechgovuk @ednewtonrex Considering the consultation on data access for AI companies went completely ignored, what exactly is the point of this? Clearly the government has already made their mind up and will do whatever they want regardless of the results of this consultation.

❓Should we ban social media for under-16s? ❓Should platforms do more to protect children online? ❓Should there be age restrictions on AI chatbots? There are lots of opinions, but what do you think? We've launched a national consultation, have your say 🔽

@kortizart @Disney Unfortunately I think Disney's strategy here is to go after infringing outputs only. They don't care if AI trains on their IP because they can use it, they just don't want anyone else to use it. But if they went after the training stage, they'd neuter their new profit-maker.

Hey @Disney “good job” partnering with Open Ai, who not only engages in the same practices you all denounce, but ALSO wants to end IP protections for everyone except their GenAi companies! Meaning you get screwed, and can never protect your IP. “AMAZING” strategy Disney lol

@ednewtonrex This seems similar to how AI trains on data scraped from the web. Not 'piracy' as such but certainly using someone else's copyrighted works for their own profit. It'll be interesting to see how this is handled as it'll likely be more applicable to other types of training too.

When Anthropic stopped training on books that were literally pirated, they managed to hit on the one way of buying books that means no money goes to authors: buying used books. They spent tens of millions of dollars buying used books from wholesalers, in batches of tens of thousands at a time. These were shipped to Illinois, scanned, and pulped. They called this Project Panama, using a codename because they didn’t want people to know they were doing it. (It ultimately came out through court documents.) Before alighting on this plan, they were discussing licensing from book publishers, which would have meant money going to authors. But then they came up with the used books plan, and stopped all licensing discussions. Anthropic uses their huge war chest to get all the books in the world (that’s their aim) - authors get nothing. IMO there are serious questions over whether this should be legal. Yes, they are buying the books. But you can’t just do anything you like with a book once you’ve bought it. You can’t scan it and sell it as an ebook, for instance. There are limits on what you can do with books you’ve bought, where what you would be doing would compete with the book’s rights holders. As Judge Chhabria said in Meta v Kadrey, LLMs will likely compete with the books they are trained on by flooding the market. And as Dario Amodei himself said in 2021, big AI companies centralizing profits by training on books without the authors getting paid is a real concern. Whatever your view of its legality, it’s pretty clear that it sucks for authors, letting Anthropic make money at their expense. Authors should get paid when their books are used to train AI, and should have the chance to say no to that training. Anthropic’s used books strategy gives them neither.

@TolkienWorldG Being a (supposed) fan of Tolkien and AI takes a level of cognitive dissonance I can hardly begin to comprehend

Of course the slopfest has the most brain-dead premise.

@ednewtonrex I see the harms of AI more likely being things like improper use, disrupting the economy, replacing people, data vulnerabilities, improper or premature implementation into critical systems (like the military) etc.

@ednewtonrex Speaking as one of the skeptics you're addressing, my current understanding of AI is that it is essentially a prediction machine, using training data as the foundation for the predictions it makes. I don't understand how it could jump from pattern recognition to consciousness

Quite a few of my followers are AI skeptics, believing it’s over-hyped, or a scam, or some combination of the two. To those people - I implore you to reconsider. The models aren’t perfect. They make mistakes. But they are already insanely capable, and they are improving. There is a crowd who will cheer you on when you point out a hallucination, or laugh at a failed task, or lament yet another inexplicable use of the word ‘quietly’. But you are avoiding the reality of the situation. Capabilities have increased exponentially over the last few years, and there is every sign this trend will continue. I’m not saying you should get on board with AI. Far from it. I think AI poses huge risks, and is pretty clearly currently on a path to being net negative for society. But denying the obvious reality achieves nothing - and, worse, will make anyone who listens to you less prepared for the huge changes that are coming. I get why it is tempting to hope it is all hype. I genuinely wish it were. And I get why people dislike it so much. I think that dislike is good, is important - it is the thing that will drive people to fight the harms AI causes. But disliking it doesn’t require you to think it is make-believe. You can fight AI’s harms without trying to convince people it is useless, when all the evidence points to the contrary. Believe CEOs when they say they are cutting their workforce because AI can do the work of workers. It is true. This is why they are cutting their workforce. They are not lying. This doesn’t mean you have to accept it is the right path. It isn’t. It is very bad news that so many in power are realising they need fewer workers, instead paying huge companies for subscriptions to AI models. But pick the right fight. The right fight is the urgent fight of addressing AI’s harms - not pretending nothing is happening. AI is very capable, and becoming more so. That should be the starting point of any discussion about this. If you think an invader isn’t real, you won’t protect yourselves until it’s too late.

@ednewtonrex Honest question: is there a reason why the dataset of books is considered 'pirated' but all the images they scraped from individual creators are never referred to as them creating a pirated database of images?

You can just pirate things.

@ednewtonrex During the Consultation, I emailed my MP and said that CSAM was in the training data due to the indiscriminate scraping of the internet. I told them exactly this would happen. I hope this is a turn in the tide, but I suspect they'll only target deepfakes and illicit outputs

I had pretty much lost faith in the UK government’s ability to regulate AI fairly, after they proposed handing creatives’ work to AI companies for free. But there are new ministers working on tech & AI, and their response to the Grok debacle has been superb. Increasingly hopeful that it is a sign these new ministers will be less subservient to US big tech, and will actually stand up for the British people.

@AubreanReverie Where can I find the master list you made?

@kortizart We need to find a quicker way to poison images en masse. I think the reason we haven't seen results from nightshade is one of volume. I wonder if there's a way to organise large groups of artists to take photos and poison those, since they're quicker to produce than painting

@SpookyZombae Hey!!! Nightshade absolutely works, just not against Img2Img because Glaze and Nightshade wasn’t built for that specific purpose. It was build to either defend/ poison the training of GenAi models! I say still poison your images and make shit really difficult for them anyway!

@Hotaru99 @csaurageul Glaze and nightshade affect AI at the training stage, they were never intended to prevent img2img edits. Saying they don't work anymore is just going to prevent people from using tools that will actually help

@csaurageul To be blunt, until the AI bubble pops, there is no solution. As others have pointed out today, even Glaze and Nightshade don’t work anymore. Not completely. I’m just going to keep sharing mostly with my friends. Nobody sees what I post here anyway.

genuinely where the fuck are we supposed to go now twitter fucking sucks facebook fucking sucks bluesky fucking sucks deviantart fucking sucks artstation fucking sucks instagram fucking sucks every public-facing corner of the internet is a nest of bots, thieves, and scammers just waiting to mangle your work, disregard copyright law and personal property and we're supposed to just spread our cheeks every fucking day and take it are we supposed to just sit in discord servers with other artists all day? how the fuck are we supposed to make a living like this? like genuinely what the fuck are we supposed to do to prevent our work getting publicly gangraped by some group of gangly soylent goblins in silicon valley every single fucking day?

@PhriekshoTV Is it feasible to make a living on NG though? I've always thought it was too niche to build a large enough audience

@csaurageul Newgrounds, my friend. They existed before all these other sites, and they *stay* anti-AI. The art portal has been growing quite a bit as a result.

@AubreanReverie Saying glaze and nightshade have failed is misunderstanding how they work. They affect AI at the training stage, they were never intended to prevent img2img edits. You're discouraging people from using tools that work because of a misunderstanding of what those tools do.

@ednewtonrex I'm genuinely surprised they gave us the real numbers for this. I managed to circulate your answers to the questions pretty far despite my small following thanks to reaching out directly to some larger artists. At the time it felt somewhat hopeless, these numbers change that

🚨 The UK government just published a breakdown of the responses to its consultation on AI & copyright: - 95% of respondents want AI companies to pay for their training data (made up of 88% saying strengthen copyright law, & 7% saying leave it as is) - Only 3.5% want a new copyright exception for AI training (3% want an exception + opt-out for rights holders, 0.5% an exception with no opt-out) These results are absolutely overwhelming. The government should rule out a new copyright exception immediately.

@stephenbeckner @ednewtonrex Agree with this completely, the machine is a product and the product is built on copyright theft Calling it 'learning' is just an attempt to anthropomorphise it

@ednewtonrex While I agree with this, the much simpler argument is that an AI doesn’t and shouldn’t have the same rights as a human being. The machine is not entitled to learn. It has no unalienable rights whatsoever, including the rights to collective human knowledge/skills.

People in AI often justify the exploitation of creatives' work for AI training with versions of: 'If people can learn from your work, why can't AI?' But this totally ignores the social contract under which people create and share their work. Traditionally, when people created and shared work, they expected other people to learn from it. But they also expected the law to protect them from people using their work to compete with them. So you expect that young people will learn from you and make up the next generation of creatives - absolutely! But you also have good evidence that people are not allowed to take your work and use it to dilute the market you're in. They can't bootleg it. They can't remix it without your permission. You expect the law to protect you. This is the social contract under which people shared their work - for years, decades, arguably centuries. Then AI comes along. Tech types say 'it's just learning from your work, like people do'. But let's be clear - this use of your work came totally out of the blue. Virtually no creative out there expected it. They made what they made knowing and expecting that people would learn from them; they did not know or expect that AI would learn from them. They expected, rightly, the law to protect them from people using their work to compete with them, to dilute their market. *This is what AI does.* AI companies copy their work for training, then sell access to the trained model - *which competes at unheard-of scale with the people whose work it uses*. The social contract under which people create is being broken. Travel writers expected other travel writers to learn from them; they did not expect OpenAI to use their work to build a model that puts them out of work. Artists expected other artists to learn from them; they did not expect Midjourney to use their work to build a model that puts them out of work. Musicians expected other musicians to learn from them; they did not expect Suno to use their work to build a model that puts them out of work. AI breaks the social contract under which creatives make and share their work. Whatever you think the law says - IMO, much of what's happening infringes copyright - there is a broader truth here. Creatives had good reason to think think the law would protect them from things like AI, even if they didn't know AI was coming. Every poll of creatives shows huge objection to AI companies' mass exploitation of their work. This is a key reason why. The social contract has been ripped apart by a group of companies that place profit above the concerns of human creators.

@ednewtonrex Glad this is focusing on the training part of the equation. It seems like a lot of the other lawsuits against AI companies focus on the outputs only.

Copyright holders in Japan are not happy about OpenAI training on their work. “In the operation of Sora 2, CODA requests that its members’ content is not used for machine learning without their permission”. ign.com/articles/japan…

@jadel4w I think this is a good move, in my opinion nightshade is the more impactful play since it poisons the datasets so I'd recommend looking into that too

I deleted all my art from here and my other socials. I’m going to upload high res and glaze it all. I didn’t think glazing worked but maybe that’s just what they want me to think. The government won’t protect my work. So glazing seems like the smart thing to do. I left up some wips and sketches as well as my little video tutorials.

@FlohCreative @ednewtonrex The illustration is credited to Miller McCormick, who is a graphic designer. Since the right hand is losing, I think the extra finger is intentional as that hand is meant to represent the AI industry.

@ednewtonrex 👀the irony using an ai generated image to illustrate the article six fingers on the right side hand 🤣

Genuinely emotional reading this. $1.5 billion to authors, in the biggest copyright settlement in history. Big tech is not above the law. This is just the start. nytimes.com/2025/09/29/opi…

@MrEwanMorrison What is your alternative strategy?

@ednewtonrex This battle is being lost. Time for a new strategy. Are you willing to look at my alternative strategy again?

Oh god, the UK government / Google deal is worse than I thought. 1. UK government will store data in the US, the literal opposite of protecting UK data 2. UK government plans “much more collaboration” with Google DeepMind, which trains AI on copyrighted work without permission. The government clearly has no intention of meaningfully regulating Google or other AI companies. These are not the moves of a government planning to regulate. theguardian.com/technology/202…