Peter Stead 🎬 ✍️

MY DEBUT NOVEL IS OUT TODAY! When Morris, a famous architect, goes missing, Kady’s search for him takes her into his very foundations. Soon her search for him will burrow beneath our whole society, to excavate its true beauty and horror. mybook.to/themannovel

and this is why hannah einbinder is our best celebrity

@JustineBateman What bothers me most is “we”.

What's most interesting to me is the language used, here and by many Tech Bros, re: AI. "We have to..." "Don't be left behind..." "You're not keeping up..." "Going to make your life easier and better..." "You have to understand..." "We have to use it." Patently ridiculous language. No one "has to" use anything. Everyone is on their own path and no one is "being left behind" at any point. Use of this type of language is nothing but an attempt to introduce fear and a lack of choice to you. You have nothing to fear, and you have free will, always. That is never not true. Never.

Today is an immensely proud day for me, it’s the release of my debut novel, a mystery called The Man. It’s about a man lost in our dystopian present and his family’s search for him. Available for pre-order here mybook.to/themannovel

@Jameswise @ednewtonrex That’s just an ad hominem attack that enables you to duck Ed’s point.

@ednewtonrex You’re better than just being a comment-guy Ed.

New technologies are disruptive, and we have to do a lot, lot more to navigate the challenges AI in particular brings. But I cannot understand the ridiculous, apocalyptic language commentators in Britain use around it. See the literal apocalyptic language below. AI has made services that were completely unaffordable for most people - like basic coding and legal advice, accessible almost for free. It’s transformational for our entrepreneurs & small businesses when they need all the help they can get. AI is a force multiplier - helping everyone from our doctors to our civil servants do far more at a time when they have to serve growing demand within limited means. AI is making many of the most boring parts of the hardest jobs - some mentioned below - more productive, allowing experts to focus on the bigger challenges. AI & robotics is being used in our defence, quite literally saving warfighters & civilian lives today. And AI is helping scientists push the frontiers of human knowledge and treatments in some of the most pernicious diseases we face. The UK is undeniably in the top 3 places in the world to start an AI company. If successful, we stand to benefit as a country from a growing AI economy more here than almost anywhere else. And if none of the above convinces you - look at British productivity over the last decade. Would you prefer the status quo?! The companies building these tools, and how we use them, deserve scrutiny. But the alarmism and pessimism needs to be balanced. We didn’t turn our back on the steam engine, or the jet engine, or the MRI scanner because they were disruptive - we invented the bloody things! The greatest crime we could commit to our economy, and to the next generation of ambitious people, is to rob them of the benefits of these tools.

@MrEwanMorrison This makes me want to vomit everywhere.

You should be aware that The Atlantic has a deal with OpenAI when you read any of its news stories about "the future of AI".

The Premier League has said the UK government must not weaken copyright law to benefit AI companies. It says AI companies must be required by law to reveal their training data, with criminal penalties for directors of companies that don’t comply. 🙌 thetimes.com/article/93f502…

🚨 BREAKING: OpenAI and Google are about to have a massive legal problem. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have repeatedly sworn to courts that their models do not store exact copies of copyrighted books. They claim their "safety training" prevents regurgitation. Researchers just dropped a paper called "Alignment Whack-a-Mole" that proves otherwise. They didn't use complex jailbreaks or malicious prompts. They just took GPT-4o, Gemini, and DeepSeek, and fine-tuned them on a normal, benign task: expanding plot summaries into full text. The safety guardrails instantly collapsed. Without ever seeing the actual book text in the prompt, the models started spitting out exact, verbatim copies of copyrighted books. Up to 90% of entire novels, word-for-word. Continuous passages exceeding 460 words at a time. But here is the part that changes everything. They fine-tuned a model exclusively on Haruki Murakami novels. It didn't just learn Murakami. It unlocked the verbatim text of over 30 completely unrelated authors across different genres. The AI wasn't learning the text during fine-tuning. The text was already permanently trapped inside its weights from pre-training. The fine-tuning just turned off the filter. It gets worse. They tested models from three completely different tech giants. All three had memorized the exact same books, in the exact same spots. A 90% overlap. It's a fundamental, industry-wide vulnerability. For years, AI companies have argued in court that their models are just "learning patterns," not storing raw data. This paper provides the smoking gun.

I Complete You’s first rating - 4/5! Buy my sick little novella here: mybook.to/icompleteyou

Sully is a lost young man, numb and trapped in a life he doesn’t understand - until he gains the ability to literally see the true selves of those around him. Could this illicit knowledge give him power over them? Or will it overwhelm his sanity first? mybook.to/cameraanimamea

@ednewtonrex From now on, let them be called Sloppify.

This website shows you how much money is being siphoned off from human artists by AI slop on Spotify. Over $2.5 million lost by real people - and that's just from 50 AI ‘artists’. Slop dilutes royalties. A major reason AI training on copyrighted work should not be considered fair use. sloptracker.org

More and more we see that backlash against generative AI in art absolutely is impactful. When people denounce its use, companies respond. The claims that gen AI in art is inevitable and there's no point fighting it are dead wrong. We can affect the extent to which its used. ✌️

@ednewtonrex From opt out to cop out? I totally agree that it’s naïve if anyone thinks this is over. We have been here before. They will still want to go ahead with something that is substantively a broad exception, and they still won’t give us transparency under any circumstances.

The UK government released its progress report on AI & copyright today. The good news for creatives is that the government formally dropped its preferred option of a broad copyright exception with an opt-out. This was unworkable and hugely unpopular. It's good that they've recognised this. The bad news is that weakening copyright law is very much still on the table. They haven't actually ruled out that hugely unpopular opt-out proposal, and they are explicit that they are still considering other forms of copyright exception too. We are obviously in a better position than we were eighteen months ago, when the government was clearly in the pocket of big tech and was actively proposing an extremely harmful policy. Credit should go to the many, many creatives who fought that proposal, and to the new leadership at DSIT for listening. But it's important not to see this as more of a win than it really is. The government is still considering weakening copyright law to favour AI companies, and those AI companies will continue to lobby very hard for them to do so. Until the government rules out weakening copyright law, people need to keep making their voices heard. Our work is not the government's to give away. Speaking up works. Read the report here: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69ba6922…

My gore-horror comedy novella I COMPLETE YOU is out TODAY £1.77/$2.99. mybook.to/icompleteyou

Want to know why Congress is doing nothing on AI? AI oligarchs have already spent over $185 million buying politicians this year. There it is. It’s no more complicated than that.

Martina, a former model, starts a new job as a door-to-door cosmetics salesperson Yet when she tries selling the products on the strange road to which she just moved, she realises that her neighbours harbour a dark beauty-related secret... mybook.to/themagickflower #gothic

13 of the world’s biggest publishers just sued the massive pirate library Anna’s Archive, seeking huge monetary damages and to get it shut down. A major driver of the lawsuit is that Anna’s Archive is providing pirated content to AI developers for training. fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/…

The House of Lords not impressed by the Magic Beans argument in its new report on copyright publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5901/ldse…