Max Ryan

Designer, developer. Lecturer @KingstonUni. Researching the overview, networks and systems, tools & graphic design. 1/2

[The Green Party @TheGreenParty]

Heatwaves aren't just uncomfortable. They put lives at risk.

It's time for maximum temperatures in schools and workplaces, and real protection for people most vulnerable to extreme heat.

[Michael Rosen 💙💙🎓🎓 NICE 爷爷 @MichaelRosenYes]

I can predict the future: there'll be a phase in the MSM-Westminster merry-go-round when Starmer will sit in TV studios being treated as a wise and humane sage, and the MSM will in effect be asking us to forget that they told us he was a weak, vascillating incompetent.

[James Meadway @meadwaj]

Wretched self-aggrandising speech by Starmer as he exits. So telling he has to return to and frame the whole thing with the usual garbage about his Labour leadership predecessor. Forgets nothing, learns nothing.

[Sulla @spqr_sulla]

Why is this type of photo only taken in the UK

[kanav @kanavtwt]

Day 1 of vibecoding

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

This is absolutely insane.

The suffragettes used far more extreme tactics than Palestine Action.

They planted bombs, burned down private homes and smashed up art galleries.

They killed five people!

Her outrageous judgement is based on absurd historical ignorance.

[Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex]

This is disgusting behaviour from Google.

It is using its monopoly power to try to force creatives to let it train on their work.

It is career suicide for artists not to upload to YouTube. Arguing that doing so allows Google to train AI on their videos/music - AI that competes with them - is outrageous. Whatever the Ts & Cs say.

[Max Ryan @MaxRyanxam]

@benwansell @ryancbriggs ‘Take’ vs a reasoned position over time

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

This is called ethnic cleansing and displacement, it’s a war crime.

@SkyNews act like it’s normal.

[Max Ryan @MaxRyanxam]

Slop. And I’m not talking about the use of Ai.

[BBC Question Time @bbcquestiontime]

Tonight Question Time features an imagined AI panel made up of historical figures who shaped the modern world

Watch the #bbcqt AI special now on @BBCiPlayer and @BBCNews to see what our REAL panel have to say on AI, including how it can blur the lines between reality and fakery

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Oracle’s £250m gift to the Tony Blair Institute appears to buy you an entire Question Time episode.

[Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex]

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.

It mentions data several times, but mostly referring to things like health data and personal data. There is no recognition that the pre-training data on which much of the AI industry is built is people’s books, music and art.

This reinforces a common misunderstanding of ‘training data’ as something anonymous, technical and obscure, when in fact it is people’s life’s work - their novels, their paintings, their songs. Readers of the encyclical who are new to AI will, I think, misunderstand what ‘training data’ actually is.

This is a coup for the AI industry, which greatly benefits from rebranding ‘people’s creative work’ to ‘training data’, since the rebranding makes it less likely that governments will protect creators’ rights.

It is hard to reconcile this omission with a letter that elsewhere, admirably, reiterates the need to “promote the dignity of every person”, and that says “justice concerns every phase of economic activity, [including] resource acquisition”.

We must remember that training data is not ‘data’ in the sense most people understand it. It is the work of people - often highly creative work.

[Faiza Shaheen @faizashaheen]

Ffs working class credentials always reduced to some caricature story about who your parents were!
This man has no interest and no history of supporting working class people
He tried to close local services including music provision in a working class borough (Redbridge), is increasing privatisation of our NHS, and *supported* student fees when he was NUS President

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

She was a drug mule nearly 30 years ago, helped put the dealer behind bars, regrets that young life of hers and “now aged, 54, she runs the Stretch charity based in Brixton, south-west London, helping drug addicts, homeless individuals, prisoners and ex-inmates. as well as other vulnerable people.”

You really should delete this tweet @LondonLabour

[DJ Pain 1 @djpain1]

Only morons and psychopaths are excited for a future run by AI

[Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex]

Why is the BBC - which is meant to be balanced - running what amounts to propaganda for the AI industry, presented as reporting?

In this segment:

- we are told it “can only be good for all of us”
- concerns of job replacement are dismissed
- concerns of students being overly reliant on AI are dismissed
- someone says AI will only take away boring, repetitive jobs
- using AI to generate images is celebrated without mentioning the models are powered by theft
- Google, Microsoft & other tech companies are celebrated as supporting the drive to embrace AI, with no mention made of the lawsuits against them
- the presenter ends with “AI is here to stay”

Is the government behind this segment? If not, why does it sound like an ad for AI?

[Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex]

The reason it is so important that we introduce transparency laws over AI training data is that AI training is one of the only instances of mass copyright infringement that is mostly invisible to the rights holder.

Usually, when someone uses your copyrighted work commercially without permission, you can see it happening. Maybe they modify your picture and use it on a magazine cover; maybe they pirate your film and resell it; maybe they steal your melody and use it in their own song. In each case, the infringement is out there in the open. That means (i) you are unlikely to miss it, and (ii) it is easy to hold the perpetrators accountable in the courts.

AI training is different. It happens behind closed doors, and the result - the trained model - might not make the infringement obvious. Models trained on copyrighted work will sometimes output obviously copyrighted work, but, much of the time, the fact that your work has been used in training isn’t obvious. So people’s work has been copied and exploited for commercial purposes, but that copying is hidden.

This is why we need new laws requiring AI companies to reveal the training data they use. Training commercial AI models on copyrighted work without permission is straight-up illegal in some countries (e.g. the UK), and there are strong arguments it is illegal in many cases in others (e.g. the US). But rights holders can't defend themselves under the law if the use of their work is kept hidden.

The only reason these transparency laws aren't more widespread already is AI industry lobbying. Governments need to resist this, and introduce transparency requirements as a matter of urgency.

[Simplifying AI @simplifyinAI]

🚨 BREAKING: OpenAI and Google are about to have a massive legal problem.

OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have repeatedly sworn to courts that their models do not store exact copies of copyrighted books.

They claim their "safety training" prevents regurgitation.

Researchers just dropped a paper called "Alignment Whack-a-Mole" that proves otherwise.

They didn't use complex jailbreaks or malicious prompts.

They just took GPT-4o, Gemini, and DeepSeek, and fine-tuned them on a normal, benign task: expanding plot summaries into full text.

The safety guardrails instantly collapsed.

Without ever seeing the actual book text in the prompt, the models started spitting out exact, verbatim copies of copyrighted books.

Up to 90% of entire novels, word-for-word. Continuous passages exceeding 460 words at a time.

But here is the part that changes everything.

They fine-tuned a model exclusively on Haruki Murakami novels.

It didn't just learn Murakami. It unlocked the verbatim text of over 30 completely unrelated authors across different genres.

The AI wasn't learning the text during fine-tuning.

The text was already permanently trapped inside its weights from pre-training. The fine-tuning just turned off the filter.

It gets worse.

They tested models from three completely different tech giants. All three had memorized the exact same books, in the exact same spots.

A 90% overlap. It's a fundamental, industry-wide vulnerability.

For years, AI companies have argued in court that their models are just "learning patterns," not storing raw data.

This paper provides the smoking gun.

[xuan (ɕɥɛn / sh-yen) @xuanalogue]

Thread is interesting bc of people arguing about whether Gaussian splats are "AI" or not (implied: is it bad / should I boycott it?).

Really shows the problems of using "AI" to refer to such a heterogeneous collection of technologies.

[The Fraud @StarmertheFraud]

PAUL HOLDEN STATEMENT IN RESPONSE TO INTERVIEW WITH JOSH SIMONS ON BBC NEWSCAST

Yesterday, BBC Newscast published a lengthy, forty-minute interview with former Cabinet Minister Josh Simons MP. The interview addressed how Simons, as a director of @LabourTogether, had appointed a firm called APCO Worldwide to investigate me and my colleagues.

I was not told by the BBC ahead of the broadcast that the episode was being recorded or aired. I was not approached to respond to the lengthy comments made about me or the small anti-corruption organisation, @ShadowWorldInv1 , that I run with my colleague @andrewfeinstein. Andrew, who is also repeatedly mentioned, was also not approached for comment.

I only found out last night, when a friend texted me, that the person who hired a major multinational reputation management firm that produced a despicable and defamatory report on me and my colleagues, and who reported me on the basis of these false and defamatory reports to the UK’s security services, was being given forty minutes to give his version of events on a major podcast published by our national broadcaster.

To be clear, the BBC has NEVER - not once - approached me to comment on a story that is, ultimately, about me, my investigations, my family and my colleagues. They did not approach me when the story first broke, and they did not approach me for this episode.

If the BBC had done so, I would have raised several issues with the way in which matters related to me were discussed. For example, Simons repeatedly stated in the interview that he instructed APCO to investigate whether my reporting or sourcing derived from a ‘hack’ of the Electoral Commission. The word ‘hack’ is used eight times in the interview.

At no time was it acknowledged in this discussion that this allegation – that I might have received hacked materials – is entirely false, and I have repeatedly proven it to be false.

Following the broadcast, I contacted the BBC to complain and to raise serious issues with the broadcast. I was contacted by the Newscast editor, Sam Bonham, to say the BBC would update the Newscast episode and further reporting to reflect some of my concerns. This has not yet happened with regards to the podcast, although I note some online reporting finally reflects a very small and limited sampling of my comments. I will wait to see if amendments and updates will follow. If they do not, I will be escalating this matter to OFCOM.

In the interim, I have decided to share the full statement I provided to the BBC, which is produced below:

I would like to put certain things on the record.

First, my reporting on Labour Together and Morgan McSweeney was entirely factually accurate and based on impeccable, legal sourcing. My sourcing has been reviewed by multiple media outlets, who confirmed the authenticity and legal provenance of my sources. Revelations based on my book, The Fraud, has subsequently been covered widely across the mainstream media, including in multiple front-page scoops, in outlets such as The Times, Daily Mail, The Guardian, The National and ITV.

The stories I produced in 2023 and 2024, and which prompted Labour Together's investigation into me, were subject to extensive editorial and legal checks. They were, I believe, entirely accurate reporting on matters of profound public interest, which included raising concerns about the character of powerful individuals like Morgan McSweeney. Considering the recent Mandelson affair, I believe I have been entirely vindicated in attempting to alert the public about McSweeney's past, including how McSweeney made use of £700,000 in funding that he unlawfully failed to declare to the Electoral Commission to procure power and influence for himself and Sir Keir Starmer.

Second, Josh Simons states that he never intended for APCO Worldwide to investigate me or my journalistic colleagues. However, a copy of the contract between APCO Worldwide and Labour Together, addressed to Simons, has now been published. The contract sets out a scope of work written in plain English.

It states that APCO will 'investigate the sourcing, funding, origins of a Sunday Times article as well as upcoming works by authors Paul Holden and Matt Taibbi.' The contract then states that the aim of the APCO investigation will be to 'provide a body of evidence that could be packaged up in the media in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together.' The contract then sets out a range of potentially invasive investigative methods that will be used to generate this 'package', including 'financial investigations' and 'human intelligence investigations.' I provide the full text of this contract below.

This contract is clear. APCO were hired to investigate me to produce materials that would 'proactively undermine' my factually accurate, public interest reporting. They would use a range of investigative techniques to do so. APCO then did exactly as was suggested in the contract, using these investigative methods to "investigate" me. This investigation has caused me and my family significant anxiety and distress.

Third, Josh Simons was provided with a report called Operation Cannon. It is the result of a lengthy investigation into me and my colleagues by APCO Worldwide. I have seen a copy of this report. It makes a series of extremely defamatory and utterly false allegations against me. It identifies my home address and sets out private information about my family. I cannot express how profoundly shocking, outrageous and defamatory this report truly is.

Simons may claim he never intended for APCO to investigate me, but on receipt of this despicable report, he then chose to use it. He submitted sections of the report to the National Cyber Security Centre to convince them to investigate me. The Guardian has published the email correspondence in which Simons repeated some of the substance of the allegations in the APCO reports.

Fourth, multiple media freedom advocacy organisations, including the NUJ, have strongly criticised the APCO investigation and these related matters. They have all, to my mind correctly, strongly criticised Labour Together and APCO for investigating journalists producing factually accurate reporting in the public interest.

Finally, I am still reviewing the Newscast interview. I will be responding in due course and I hope that the BBC will, this time, give me the platform to set out what really happened and why.

Text of Contract Between Labour Together and APCO Worldwide, addressed to Josh Simons

Dear Mr Simons

We are pleased that you have selected APCO Worldwide Limited (“APCO”) to provide the following scope of work (“services”) during Term:

APCO will devise a concise strategy to aid Labour Together. APCO will investigate the sourcing, funding and origins of a Sunday Times article about Labour Together, as well as upcoming works by authors Paul Holden and Matt Taibbi – to establish who and what are behind the coordinated attacks on Labour Together. The approach should provide a body of evidence that could be packaged up for use in the media in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together. The material can also inform any future legal strategy that Labour Together might wish to pursue against any of these parties.

The work will include:

• Open Source Investigations (OSINT): Recovery and Preservation of Evidence
• Human Intelligence Investigation (HUMINT): Recovery and Preservation of Evidence
• Financial Investigation: Forensic Accounting Focus
• Digital Forensics Investigation: Recovery and Preservation of Evidence
• Stakeholder Outreach
• Media Packaging and Dissemination