A circus musician goes into a bar. The bar goes wah wah waaah.

It's hard to miss the perfect portrayals of Trump and Vance.

Still time to sign up for a half-day seminar "Adapting to AI in the Creative Industries" on Oct 17th - a powerful resource with so much to keep up with everything going on in copyright, content licensing, new business models. www.eventbrite.com.au/e/adapting-t...

Humprhy Davy, is this epically cynical or epically enlightened? "The art of living happy is, I believe, the art of being agreeably deluded; and faith in all things is superior to Reason, which, after all, is but a dead weight in advanced life, though as the pendulum to the clock in youth."

Music indies sound the alarm bells!! So called "attribution technology" will be nothing like the world of streaming or record sales where a successful artist can track their popularity. It will be a murky tech-metricocracy that will benefit those with the most compute. www.ft.com/content/1a1a...

Excellent take. If you add up the value of the knowledge needed to train AI and cost it properly, this cannot possibly be something a private corporation can be allowed to own and seek rent on. But can anyone be trusted? theconversation.com/generative-a...

I maintain, this will end up with AI robots ambling down the street with microphone on, loitering near shopfronts, passing cars, and picnicking families, as a way of capturing music "inadvertently" for training. www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/inspired-by-...

Generative image/audio folks, I'm looking for contemporary examples of training data used in different ways. e.g., one set of image data used for learning object structure and another used for learning painterly style. Any and all examples welcome, particularly academic papers.

Sydney, I'm speaking at this awesome curated series of talks at the Uni of Western Sydney, as are my two fabulous PhD students Chloe McFadden and Tom Willma, along with a great line up of talks about art and AI.

What's the best way to write some text for future flexibility. Needs to mange citations in a sensible way. MD, HTML, RTF, .docx, TeX? Or is that moot because we can convert so easily? I started writing my new book in HTML1 😀📜 but I don't have a referencing solution.

Yes. Watch and share. Viralise the hell out of this. Do you want to look back at this and say, "remember when we had freedom to criticise our leaders" or look back and say "this was the moment people stood up to authoritarianism in the US". Nothing is decided yet.

Had a dream where if I held my breath my hair would grow slowly out into this giant afro until I breathed out and it went back to normal. I went around showing off my party trick. Got it to go a full metre in diameter. Good dream.

Not sure I've raved enough about the inaugural AI Music Studies Conference last year in Stockholm, which showcased an exceptional standard of scholarship. In March 2026 it comes to Nottingham. Delighted to be on the Steering Committee. I just hope I can make it! www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/gro...

What's happening with Jimmy Kimmel is about politics and power.

I'm running another iteration of my webinar "Adapting to AI in the Creative Industries". Online, Friday 17th October 2025. 10am-1pm (AEST - Sydney). Cost $50 (AUD). Register here www.eventbrite.com.au/e/adapting-t...

What will it take for foreign leaders, especially US allies, to unite in calling out Trump's authoritarianism? We could do it politely.

I'm running another iteration of my webinar "Adapting to AI in the Creative Industries". Online, Friday 17th October 2025. 10am-1pm (AEST - Sydney). Cost $50 (AUD). Register here www.eventbrite.com.au/e/adapting-t...

UNSW PhD student Chloe McFadden's performance artwork gets you to examine your relationship to trust in the predictive algorithms around you, especially those pesky LLMs and their reassured confidence.

Trump visits the one man in the UK who truly understands his woes with the democratic process.

Bravo ABC Late Night Live. Not messing around on Kirk. www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

Is this the article JD Vance is saying celebrates Charlie Kirk's death, that is his pretext for defunding left wing organisations? It seems very clear it doesn't celebrate his death. Trump has supported and forgiven violent terrorism from Jan 6. www.thenation.com/article/poli...

You recognised you're privileged, then you see a talk by someone who is genuinely upset that they can't get the minister to give them $2M for innovation projects despite texting the minister repeatedly. "I mean it's only $2M, why is it so hard".

My god thank you. Doesn't matter who you are, what party you're from, what your background is, just show a bit of spine. Conservatives... Hello, remember the centre (before Boris)? Win people back. I'll take austerity over fascism.

I've written to Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, urging them to join me in condemning Elon Musk's dangerous remarks inciting violence yesterday. As leaders, we must stand together and make clear Musk will face serious consequences for these actions.

This is inciting violence pure and simple. Sick at the thought my country can be torn apart by this awful man as he did the US.

Let's condemn the politically motivated murder of Kirk but not accept partisan claims that the left is violent, as if the shooter represents the left. Reps including Trump have normalised such brazen politicisation. It's also apt to mark how racist he was to show this is the legacy they celebrate.

What do you think about Australia "associating with" Horizon Europe? It's not me asking, but the Department of Industry, Science and Resources. If you're interested, make a submission to their "request for information": ▶️ consult.industry.gov.au/association-...

Ok Guardian has been my lifeline paper for years but after a frustrating personal experience recently and increasingly seeing uncritical reporting like this I'm despairing. We must question how on earth AI decision making actually achieves transparency. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Stochastic payouts hallucinate as much as stochastic parrots. The music business should be very wary of anyone claiming that an "AI output can be traced back to the human-created works that 'influenced' it." This is ripe for being gamed. www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/swedens-stim...

I've read a lot of literature and had a lot of discussions recently about whether certain terms should apply to AI or should be considered inappropriate anthropomorphisations. One case is "learning" itself.

Trying to exhaustively catalogue payment models from gen AI to copyright holders, and then evaluate how well those models correspond to artists' concepts of value and fairness. For example, Adobe pays its stock artists an "AI bonus" which is proportional to their existing success (proxy measure).

This person is clearly overworked, having to constantly monitor her bots from bed in the fear that they bring down the company. What is she even doing? And what is this "reviewing" about? Intense 24/7 red teaming to identify dangerous behaviours, or a firehose of customer complaints?

This is a nice piece connecting Marcus to Dreyfus. But it seems increasingly hard to tread the line between dismissing AI hype and still recognising that current ML performs cognitive feats. We risk rejecting any sensible frame for analysis. quillette.com/2025/09/07/c...

This is a really well researched piece that goes into bubbles and productivity hype in depth. Interesting that email had productivity loss effects. Does this count as a Jevons paradox? I'm feeling more confident of an AI crash day by day. www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...

Incredible clip of tech CEOs fawning over Donald Trump. Someone store this clip in the underground archive vault

Hear hear. We continue to follow the reasoning that AI must be beneficial a priori, then push any concerns into a checklist of todos for tech cos to solve (for which we must pay them). There are so many reasons to believe AI is not safe or desirable. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/cognitive-...

What idiot called it a Dad joke instead of popcorn?

Very important ruling but the flipside is that they were allowed to train the model with the data, which is wrong. Just not get the data by illegal means. If I pay 10c for a track that's not a fair price for AI ingestion. Even $3k is not a fair price. 🤔 www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

What is style anyway?

Humility on superintelligence. Perhaps intelligence asymptotically maxes out, like terminal velocity or the optimum efficiency of an Internal Combustion Engine. Perhaps we hit that max long ago, and bias, confusion and memory limits are the entropy or drag of the AI race.

Bravo, Cory Doctorow. A single word can change the discourse.

A major policy swing for Spotify in the wake of recent criticism and exodus? And it's all about human v algorithmic recommendation. I'm keen to see where this goes. www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/slide-into-s...

This is OpenAI's economic blueprint for Australia. I've always been a bit slow with economics. Pretty complex stuff. Like, I can't help thinking there's some kind of contradiction between creating jobs and increasing productivity. Maybe even a paradox? A productivity paradox?

Brilliant analysis. If you move the curve of what's acceptable to the right you drape the tail of it over the Nazis. That for absolute sure has happened consistently over years.

Does your org have an email signature policy that says: - don't use images. - don't have signature on by default, use only when needed. It seems most practices go the opposite way. Email is a tiny proportion of the world's data use. But it can still use data efficiently, let alone cognitive load.

Look at this graph. The share of national income going to the richest 10 percent was lowest (and share to lower 90 percent highest) when union membership was at its highest. As unions have weakened, inequality has widened. This is why we must build back union power.

Anyone interested in the emerging cultures of AI and the arts: the comment thread on this article is a prime artifact. www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/suno-argues-... Witness the foundational polarisation we see elsewhere. machine learning as inspiration v machine learning as copying.

Fascism truly exists in a world so far beyond reason that you can claim to protest immigration, as immigrants, then attack the only people in this country who are not immigrants. That's possible if you suppress thought enough. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09...

Please sign and share: www.change.org/p/rfk-jr-mus...

What a line up. Noteworthy that Jimi Hendrix is billed as an international act. And Ravi Shankar is in the small print.