Tom Matuszewski

New week, new website, new work for you to have a look at... motski.com

People are becoming way too comfortable about being horrible human beings

Today, we're publishing Don't Steal This Book - a (mostly) empty book from almost 10,000 authors, protesting the theft of their work by AI companies. The UK government is considering upending copyright law to benefit AI companies. Don’t Steal This Book urges them not to. Apart from the list of authors involved, the book is empty, representing the effect the government’s plans would have on authors' livelihoods. We're handing out 1,000 free copies at London Book Fair over the next couple of days. If you’re there, pick up a copy! A huge thank you to the thousands of authors involved. Read more here: theguardian.com/technology/202… #DontStealThisBook

There's a toxic culture coming out of the AI industry that keeps trying to get us not to think. The message is everywhere. Don’t read the code, just vibe-code. Don’t try to understand all the text, just let AI summarize it. Don’t bother educating yourself, it’s too late. Don’t worry about the errors. Trust that everything will be fixed in the next version. The theme is the same. Don’t think too hard. Just keep swallowing the slop.

The reason this is tripping people's AI alarm bells is something I've talked about before. It's more like photography in motion rather than what we normally think of as video. I'll explain how that relates to an "AI aesthetic": The photographer here has taken 210 high-res images in sequence per subject, graded them as stills, and then displayed them at 30fps as video. In other words, the images have been processed in a manner typically reserved for still photography, on a camera and lens designed for stills, in a studio set up for stills, and now because they've turned it into video, we're seeing a particular style and clarity that's not often seen in motion. How does this relate to AI? Well, AI video is frequently based on AI still frames which are from models that are trained primarily on photography, rather than video frames. This means we're now seeing styles in full motion that we've only ever seen as static images. See where this is going? For example, imagine a photo from the mid-2000s trend of overly processed HDR photography, a look very specific to digital photography of that era, and now imagine that in full motion. It would be uncanny and unfamiliar. Today, we're conditioned to call out anything that feels uncanny or unfamiliar as AI, and because this feels like photography in motion rather than video or film, that's what people are doing. I also don't think the concept itself helps, showing people's faces contort in intimate, highly detailed closeups, but it is what it is. Anyway, hope this helps you understand why this feels off and maybe give you some knowledge you can put to use when coming across other stuff online. I'm personally not a fan at all, but for what it's worth, this technique can be quite awesome with the right subject matter.

@rcbregman This is brilliant. Media Capture Watch has a full dataviz of relationships between media & tech firms & why it matters. I get why Axios & News Corp made purely capitalist decision to take $ but independent progressive news orgs should be nowhere near this nananwachukwu.github.io/media-capture-…

The UK government is hugely overstating how many people their new ‘AI Growth Zone’ will employ. They announced that it will create 800 full-time jobs. I submitted an FOI request for their calculations, and the real number is probably below 300. Their headline figure was even bigger - 3,400 jobs. Most of these, though, are temporary construction jobs while the data centres get built. Spinning <300 permanent jobs as “3,400 jobs” is wild. It seems like yet another attempt by the government to paint AI as a jobs creator, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Full post below.

Artist-washing (verb): to intentionally distract from AI models’ exploitation of creators’ life’s work by finding individual artists willing to use those models

I've identified industrial-scale copyright violations on my content by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, X, and more. These companies created thousands of crawlers incorporating the text of all my blog posts, open source code, and books into their paid AI models to profit exorbitantly.

I have a website about Traditional Chinese Medicine that I spent literal years building. When I asked questions to Claude about the topic, it parroted almost word-for-word what I myself wrote. So please spare us the gaslighting about training AI on others' work...

He’s just flat out lying. Hollywood writers hate AI and have been fighting against it. They want you guys to think this stuff is being normalized by the masses when it’s not

@lisanandy If you think we lead the world in film, TV, music and the arts, why has your government proposed handing our film, TV, music & arts to AI companies for free? And, as Culture Secretary, why haven’t you objected to this?

The UK’s Culture Secretary @lisanandy has never tweeted about AI. Not once. This is the person the creative sector needs to stand up for them - while AI companies steal their work, and while others in government entertain legalising this theft. Why is the Culture Secretary not defending British culture, and coming out vocally & strongly against the theft of British creatives’ work by AI companies?

Creatives in the UK - please fill out this government survey about generative AI. It is a chance to affect their thinking. (It officially closed yesterday but seems still to be accepting responses.) surveymonkey.com/r/KNSJJB5?fbcl…

@RhonddaBryant It doesn’t like we have much of a future with all the support for AI from this government. No one has stood up for creatives and copyright, we’re at the sharp edge of AI replacement, the canary in the coal mine for the collapse of the tax base as the middle classes are decimated.

Utter folly. Creative industries employ 1.4 million people, £145billion of value to the economy and saw 5% growth last year. They’re our future.

He's not just defending AI energy use. He is smuggling in a whole anthropology where humans are basically inefficient meat computers that you have to pour food and years into before they become useful. And once you accept that, the next move is obvious. If people are just costly biological training runs, then burning mountains of electricity to build synthetic intelligence starts to feel not only equal, but superior, even if it negatively impacts actual humans. That is the dystopian. It makes human development sound like a bug in the system, and it makes sacrificing human and creational flourishing for more computational power sound logical. To him, the grid gets strained, prices go up, ecosystems get hit, but hey, humans eat too, so what's the difference? The difference is that humans aren't an inefficient line item. They're the point. If your worldview can look at a child growing into an adult and describe it as energy spent to train intelligence, you haven't said something profound. You've revealed a horrifically rotten worldview.

@ednewtonrex @lisanandy Completely agree @lisanandy needs to answer for this, no protection for the creative sector at all

The UK’s AI minister is boosting AI companies that exploit British citizens’ copyrighted work without permission, calling them “superstars”. Why is Culture Secretary @lisanandy not standing up for the creative industries? Is this now just a government of pirates?

The CEO of ElevenLabs blocked me for asking what they train their models on. I’m told he also explicitly told employees not to reply to me when I asked this. Execs at billion-dollar AI companies have a very thin skin when asked about their training data. This is because it belongs to other people. This is a guy the UK’s AI minister refers to as a “superstar”. Yet he won’t admit to exploiting creatives’ work to build his fortune. Please continue asking him what they train on, now that I can’t!

@KanishkaNarayan @OpenAI @Microsoft Technology built on stolen work that will ruin the fabric of society. Just a funnel for money to the billionaires while the rest of us lose our jobs and beg for scraps.

We can only unlock the full power of AI if people trust it. With fresh backing from @OpenAI and @Microsoft, we’re working on AI that delivers benefits safely, confidently and for everyone.

@KanishkaNarayan @OpenAI @Microsoft Partnering with companies that build their products by stealing creatives’ work is a bad way to build trust.