CEO of @fairlytrained / Composer. Involuntary training data provider.
London, England
Joined August 2009
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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/2…
#DontStealThisBook
AI companies' relentless scraping is forcing Reddit to move behind a login.
Yet more evidence that AI's exploitative practices are making the internet more closed.
If you pillage a town, you should expect it to put up walls.
NEW: In a huge departure from its 21 year history as an open web champion, @Reddit is moving to become a primarily logged-in experience
— I spoke w CEO Steve Huffman & COO Jen Wong about why now, and what it will look like. Takeaways:
👀Homepage will still be accessible to logged-out visitors
🔎Logged-in users can still be anonymous
More on @axios below:
Ed Newton-Rex retweeted
Holy shit, I had seen that ChatGPT encouraged an epileptic woman to cut down on her seizure meds (and approved of her hiding that fact from her doctor), but I had missed that it was 4o, the endlessly affirming model...
and that she died the literal day before OpenAI finally removed it.
A lot of people have moved on from what happened there, but I dug deep into it for my book Obsolete (one of the chapters is a previously unreported story of ChatGPT exacerbating a psychotic break), and the details of what OpenAI did are so incredibly damning.
This is the best piece of reporting on it:
nytimes.com/2025/11/23/techn…
Here's the new story:
nytimes.com/2026/10/27/well/…
And here's a link to my book: obsoletebook.org/
Ed Newton-Rex retweeted
90,835 of the 118,756 responses (76%) to the 2023 UK govt consultation on the tobacco and vapes bill were machine-generated.
Corporations have a new tool for subverting polices and public opinion.
To increase profits, spread addiction, health hazards.
theguardian.com/society/2026…
Anthropic's S1 reveals that the company considers copyright law a massive risk.
It says: "If we cannot rely on the fair use doctrine to access copyrighted work for training our models, we may be required to pay significant fees to obtain a license to such training data or our ability to further develop our models [...] and distribute models trained on such data at issue could be adversely affected."
Adverse rulings "could require us to retrain affected models from scratch at substantial cost."
It notes that the copyright questions around AI training have not been resolved in the US, and that other countries don't even have 'fair use'.
There is hope yet.
Ed Newton-Rex retweeted
Travis Knight says that LAIKA will never use generative AI in their films.
“AI is theft. It’s the ingestion of years and years and years of human creativity and ingenuity, regurgitated back. It has no humanity. It has no spirit.”
(Source: theplaylist.net/wildwood-tra…)
Ed Newton-Rex retweeted
Excellent and disturbing new report from @EndCorruptionUK based on over 40 FOI requests.
Spotlight has found that UK govt ministers have held 137 meetings about Data Centres and AI growth zones between June 2024 and June 2026... but they didn't meet a single environmental group.
Government met only two community groups - but only AFTER the government had approved growth zones in their communities.
At the same time, Spotlight found that 38 government officials had left to take positions at AI and tech firms.
Spotlight is (correctly) calling for a halt on the approval of new AI and Data Centre Development zones until there has been a proper national consultation on community and environmental impacts. In other countries, these consultations have led to important new regulations to enforce environmental protections.
As Anthropic prepares to IPO for over $1 trillion, a reminder of Dario Amodei’s words shortly after founding the company:
“Distributed human labor is being used to train AI models by large, centralized actors, who concentrate the resulting profits while in the long run making the human labor obsolete.”
In other words, this IPO will be built off the backs of the world’s creatives - who will get nothing out of it except obsolescence.
It is a totally unjust transfer of wealth and opportunity from artists, writers, musicians & other creatives to a tiny tech elite.
I hope it is remembered as such.
(this quote is from a document he wrote that was unsealed in Bartz v. Anthropic)
Ed Newton-Rex retweeted
‼️ EU governments approved a GDPR change to let companies train AI on Europeans' personal data without consent.
It makes AI training a possible "legitimate interest", judged case by case. Parliament must still agree.
Max Schrems calls it a "digital expropriation" of Europeans.
Ed Newton-Rex retweeted
Pangram is good, but has some well-known failure modes, like:
- A time you heard it didn't work
- A school essay you wrote years ago that it flagged as AI (you don't have a link or the essay text handy)
- A different AI detector got it wrong, and they're all the same, right?
This tweet, from Suno’s lead investor, will surely be used in court one day.
She says she has shifted her listening from Spotify to Suno. *This is a direct admission that Suno competes with the music it trains on.*
This is exactly the kind of competition that Judge Chhabria, in Kadrey v. Meta, said could lead to AI companies losing copyright lawsuits: AI products “helping to enable the rapid generation of countless works that compete with the originals”.
The fourth factor affecting fair use decisions - and the one Chhabria says is most important - is the effect of the copying (here, the training) on “the potential market for or value of” the copyrighted work.
Suno’s lead investor here provides evidence that Suno displaces demand for the music it is trained on.
She even specifically says she uses it as a replacement for the music the *record labels* release - the very companies suing Suno.
It is clear to any rational observer that AI music models, trained on copyrighted music without permission, will harm that music’s market & value. But it is still pretty shocking to see Suno’s lead investor admit as much.
This quoted post is unavailable.
"This tweet, from Suno's lead investor, will surely be used in court one day."
Well @ednewtonrex, you were right. UMG is using it as grounds to take her deposition. Court granted the motion this morning.
it's weird how every time pangram is wrong, the reporter happens to have deleted all records of the original text
can't for the life of me imagine where anthropic's models learned to access data without paying for it
Another lawsuit against Suno just landed, filed by the company that owns Ring of Fire & much more. It accuses Suno of being "a massive vehicle for copyright infringement".
storage.courtlistener.com/re…
This should be illegal.
The harms of this tech (enabling scams & fraud) obviously outweigh any potential benefits right now.
Politicians should outlaw this as a matter of urgency.
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
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Ed Newton-Rex retweeted
AI companies: “AI is going to cure cancer and unify physics.”
Also AI companies: “Check out our new product! It’s for phone scams :)”
In public, the UK government says it will ensure AI benefits “every postcode”.
In private, it admits the AI schemes it is funding will ‘plausibly’ mostly benefit London & the south-east.
Ed Newton-Rex retweeted
Our decision to rush ahead making a dangerous, dual-use product without adequate basic security measures in place was unavoidable and preordained by destiny. We tried to warn you about our own recklessness and disregard for safety or the law.
Ed Newton-Rex retweeted
I'm always trying to warn the world about the powerful, earth-shakingly destructive capabilities of the technology that I simply have no choice to continue to build, develop, and profit off of
What this tweet from the UK's AI minister doesn't mention is that the AI Biosecurity Lab is another partnership between the government and OpenAI & Anthropic.
We significantly weaken our ability to regulate against the harms caused by these companies if we continually partner with them & increasingly rely on their goodwill.
2/7 We're launching a £165m National AI Biosecurity Initiative, including £100m for a world-first AI Biosecurity Lab.
This will harness British scientific expertise and latest AI to detect biological threats and protect people from emerging risks.
As with our @AISecurityInst, I want the new AIBL to lead the world in capability.