Anyone who has worked in / adjacent to trust & safety teams in big tech will tell you there's no way the X team didn't consider the potential for Grok to undress people ahead of releasing it. Yet they released it anyway. 🧵 1/n

Pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that the AI backlash in 2026 will make what happened in 2025 look like gentle disapproval.

Six authors are suing Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI and Perplexity for what they call “a straightforward and deliberate act of theft that constitutes copyright infringement.” The lawsuits over AI training show no signs of abating. aboutblaw.com/bkv0

And therefore if you wish to get research funding for an AI project right now you must either be doing security/defence or assurance. Or maybe sovereignty because they like that too. It's incredibly shortsighted and it's making my job more difficult and more boring.

An analysis of X posts from the UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology suggests it is overwhelmingly pro-AI. I analysed the sentiment of every X post from DSIT that mentioned "AI" this year. Of 122 posts, 110 were positive about AI, and only 7 mentioned its downsides. 🧵 1/2

New copyright lawsuit just dropped. It's a class action lawsuit brought by independent musicians against AI music product Mureka. It alleges Mureka systematically copied & stored musicians' work to create a product that competes with them. 🧵 1/3

I'm keen to speak with any creatives who have lost work because of generative AI, for something I'm writing. If this is you, please DM me. Thank you!

Updating my resume

Brutal (but fair) Guardian headline today Only 3% of respondents to the UK government’s consultation on AI & copyright supported their unfair plan to hand AI companies people’s work for free. 95% said AI companies should license training data. 🧵 1/2

[jaunty music plays]

I wrote to my MP about the govt plans ages ago. He said "We need to balance rights against the need for growth", "I'm assured that we'll be able to provide sufficient power for new datacentres", and "Let's just wait and see what the results of the survey are". Hope he takes the L gracefully.

Remember how biased and leading the questions were in favour of the AI companies? And this was still the response.

This whole thing was made so our gov could say 'see nobody cares' to the point most of the questions were leading to that outcome... And people still spoke almost universally against it. The more you push shit on people they don't want, the more they'll push back!

@ianmurraymp.bsky.social you're now in a position where you can hopefully be very vocal about this - please take note!

I filled in this survey and saw the questions were hilariously leading and noted the whole thing was clearly designed to fatigue the people filling it in. And yet, even with all that, only 3% of respondents agreed with Labour's preferred option. Incredible, well done all 🎉

Hey @shaundaviesmp.bsky.social, you folks are going to listen to the people right? Hoping to get some reassurance from my local MP.

🚨 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) 🧵 1/2

It’s time for the UK government to rule out an AI copyright exception. Stand up for British creatives, and pave the way for an AI industry that can thrive without exploiting millions of people. My piece in today’s Times: www.thetimes.com/business/tec...

The vinyls of our silent album protesting the UK government’s proposals on AI & copyright are being pressed right now and they look beautiful Through pre-orders, we’ve already sold over half of the limited run of 1,000 copies :) Order one now at 1000artists.greedbag.com 🧵 1/2

It’s a year since Suchir Balaji, the former OpenAI employee who spoke out on copyright, died. In the brief time in which I got to know him, it was immediately apparent that he was an incredible person. 🧵 1/8

It has been pointed out to me that this means 2.5 billion-dollar AI music company Suno has spent less money on music than many individual music fans

Billboard got access to Suno’s investment pitch deck. It revealed that Suno has spent $32 million on compute, and $2,000 on training data. Let that sink in. www.billboard.com/pro/suno-cre...

It’s funny to observe a concerted effort among AI types to rebrand slop as a term that also applies to human-made work. This attempted rebrand is 100% because it’s so extraordinarily effective as a word to describe and dismiss all AI output. 🧵 1/4

AI types like to argue that image models - like Google’s new one yesterday - will make illustrators more efficient, or will actually create *more* work for the best artists. But what they will really do is put artists out of work, and do so unfairly. 🧵 1/n

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. 🧵 1/14

This is one of the worst, most horrifying exposures we have ever seen. It is hard to overstate how bad the things that people are using tools like for are, and it's insane to pretend like these tools are anything other than nonconsensual porn machines www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

It is indescribably sad that, if you exploit “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet” without paying the musicians behind them - and create a model that can compete with those musicians - this is how you are rewarded

Today we’re releasing the vinyl of Is This What We Want?, the silent album from 1000+ musicians protesting the UK government’s plans on AI & copyright. New (silent) bonus track by Paul McCartney. 🧵 1/4

Insane new stats on AI music: - 50,000 AI songs are uploaded every day - 34% of songs uploaded are AI-generated Massive respect to Deezer for being open about this - and being the only streaming platform to try to fight it. This can't become the new normal.

Big win for creatives today in the battle against exploitation by AI companies ⬇️ German court rules OpenAI infringed copyright when it trained on copyrighted song lyrics www.reuters.com/world/german...

Continually baffled that I was subject to far stricter ethics rules around investments as a junior lawyer than government members / advisors are. Avoiding the actuality (and appearance) of conflicts of interest is good, actually

This... just seems mad. The whole point of a register of interests is to allow it to be judged whether there are conflicts. If the information is hidden, the register has no value.

There’s a good chance the British Prime Minister’s main adviser on AI is an OpenAI shareholder - but the government refuses to say whether she is. 🧵 1/5

The Coca-Cola Christmas ad, made with AI, used at least eight AI models known to be trained on copyrighted work without permission. This is a huge middle finger to the artists whose work these models exploit, at scale, for huge commercial gain.

New AI copyright lawsuit just landed - Danish music rights org Koda sues Suno for what it calls “the biggest theft in music history”. Danish rights holders, it seems - like many others around the world - have had enough. x.com/ednewtonrex/...

Universal Music have settled their lawsuit with Udio. From the little that is known about the settlement, this looks like a big win for creatives: 🧵 1/5

A big tech lobbying group has asked Trump to issue an Executive Order telling the DOJ to intervene in AI copyright lawsuits in favor of AI companies. Astonishingly brazen request. Though IMO suggests AI companies are v worried they will lose in court. progresschamber.org/resources/wh...

That thing where you read a headline with hope and optimism that Starmer’s government has made a good policy decision only to learn that the headline is about the Australian Labour party instead.

If only this were @teamlabouruk.bsky.social …

Looking at you, UK government...

In huge positive news, the Australian government just ruled out handing the work of their country’s creatives to AI companies for free 🙌 They resisted the well-funded tech lobby & shut down proposals to upend copyright law. Other governments should do the same! www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

This Machines Like Us episode with @taylorowen.bsky.social and @ednewtonrex.bsky.social is excellent. The public, once again, is correct and ahead of the Carney government: According to a new poll by Leger, 85% of Canadians want government regulation for “AI”, not its rapid acceleration.

The UK government hasn't ruled out weakening copyright law in low-regulation zones to benefit AI companies. They say they "intend" IP rights to be a red line for these zones. But they are "seeking views" on this. Please make your views known! www.gov.uk/government/c...

New lawsuit against AI music company Suno just landed - brought by a group of independent musicians. The same group of musicians who also sued Udio this week. www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/...

💥 Independent musicians just filed another copyright lawsuit against AI music company Udio. It's notable that, while Udio says its mission is "to empower artists of all kinds to create extraordinary music", many of those artists are suing them. chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/wp-content/u...

Someone should probably inform the White House's "AI & Crypto Czar" that no one is forcing AI companies to train their models on Wikipedia

More good news on AI & copyright: OpenAI reportedly on track to lose in German copyright case over song lyrics. aifray.com/breaking-ope...

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. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/o...

When you run a poll and find that the public is concerned about AI, it takes crazy levels of AI boosterism to conclude that the public is wrong and the govt must educate them. Perhaps… the public is right. Politicians should listen to the public, not the Larry Ellison-funded Tony Blair Institute.