CEO of @fairlytrained / Composer. Involuntary training data provider.
Jan 29 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
I took a closer look at the UK government's new 'AI Skills Hub', and it is insane.
It includes 'courses' that are simply links to info pages about PhD programs; 'courses' that are literally just software developer documentation; and 'courses' that don't exist at all.
Short 🧵
Let's start by being generous - a course that's actually a course.
But it's labelled as a free course, when in fact you have to pay to take it.
Jan 28 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
The UK government's AI Skills Hub, launched today, is little more than thinly-veiled propaganda for AI companies.
I took a look at the courses. They include:
- Intros to generative AI by big tech companies that call AI "miraculous" and gloss over the huge controversy around what it's trained on
- A course for creatives marketed as 'AI: friend or foe?' that is exclusively about how creatives can harness & integrate AI, ignoring the many issues like IP rights, deskilling etc.
- A single course on AI & IP, which seems designed to trivialise the actual issues, and which talks about US law instead of UK law
First off, the courses that are simply big-tech-written introductions to generative AI. Here is Microsoft's.
They say AI has an "almost miraculous ability to produce human-like original content"; their one sentence on data just says it's from the "internet and other sources".
No mention of the fact that those "other sources" are people's copyrighted works, and Microsoft is facing multiple lawsuits as a result.
Jul 17, 2024 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
Many in the AI world underestimate the backlash against AI. It is serious & growing.
AI developers need to understand the strength of feeling & really engage with people on this.
A few examples:
1. A London cinema dropped AI-written film after backlash.
I analyzed a bunch of Suno's output, and found it generates music that closely resembles well-known, copyrighted music: melodies, chord progressions, lyrics, instrumental parts, and styles. This raises serious questions about what it’s trained on.
Here are some examples 👇🧵
(Link to my full piece in @musicbizworld further down)
I've been able to generate music in the style of most artists I've tried. Here's Eminem. Suno has some prompt filtering, but, like other gen AI systems, these are easy to get around with mis-spellings etc.
