Ed Newton-Rex

Reading the Papal Encyclical again, it strikes me that not only is there no mention of the theft of creative work behind AI - there is no acknowledgement that pre-training data includes people’s creative work at all. This is an unfortunate omission. 🧵 1/6

People talk a lot about speculative AI risks. But the theft of creative work to power AI isn’t a risk - it’s an actual harm that has already happened, is still happening, and needs to be redressed.

It’s no longer just AI companies & their founders being sued over AI training - individual researchers are now being sued, too. In a new lawsuit, two authors allege that Guillaume Lample, while an AI researcher at Meta, torrented 70 terabytes of pirated books… 1/2

It is deeply disappointing that the Pope’s Encyclical Letter on AI didn’t mention the theft that most generative AI models are built on. What happened to ‘Thou shalt not steal’? 1/3

AI music company Suno has just been sued again. A duo of multi-instrumentalists called The American Dollar says Suno (i) trained on their music and (ii) has caused an 80% drop in their licensing revenue. They accuse Suno of “massive and ongoing infringement”.

I submitted an FOI request, and found out that the UK's Sovereign AI Fund doesn't check whether the companies it backs adhere to copyright law. Sov AI's Chair has said publicly that they will "only invest in companies that follow [copyright law]" - but we now know they don't check this. 🧵 1/6

Strong signs that >50% of Clive Lewis MP's Guardian article today was written by AI. That's according to Pangram, which has a very low false positive rate (1 in 10,000). This would contravene the @theguardian.com's AI policy if so.