Not enough people are talking about data/copyright laundering.

OpenAI has subpoenaed Tyler Johnston, head of the AI watchdog group The Midas Project, demanding all his communications about the company—part of a broader legal campaign targeting critics and regulation advocates. This marks a sharp escalation in the AI industry's political strategy, using litigation to probe and potentially intimidate civil society actors. 🧾 What Happened to Tyler Johnston? 🔹 Tyler Johnston is the executive director of The Midas Project, a nonprofit watchdog focused on AI accountability and transparency. 🔹 In September 2025, OpenAI served Johnston with a subpoena demanding all texts, emails, and documents related to OpenAI, including communications with journalists, funders, and other advocacy groups. 🔹 The subpoena was delivered to his home, a move critics say was designed to intimidate. 🧠 Why Is OpenAI Doing This? 🔹 OpenAI claims the subpoenas are part of its ongoing legal battle with Elon Musk, who co-founded the company but later became a vocal critic. 🔹 The company alleges that some nonprofits—including The Midas Project, Encode, and others—may be coordinating with Musk or receiving funding from him to undermine OpenAI’s credibility or regulatory standing. 🔹 Critics argue this is a pretext for legal intimidation, aimed at silencing dissent and chilling advocacy around AI regulation. 🧩 The Bigger Picture: A New Political Strategy 🔹 This is part of a broader shift in OpenAI’s posture, from a nonprofit focused on AI safety to a for-profit powerhouse aggressively defending its interests. 🔹 At least seven nonprofits have received subpoenas from OpenAI in recent months, many of which supported California’s SB 53, a bill requiring transparency from AI companies. 🔹 The subpoenas often demand sweeping access to internal communications, including discussions about legislation, strategy, and funding sources. ⚖️ Legal and Ethical Concerns: 🔹 Civil society groups argue these subpoenas are overbroad and retaliatory, potentially violating First Amendment protections for political advocacy. 🔹 Legal experts warn this could set a dangerous precedent, where powerful tech firms use litigation to deter watchdogs and policy advocates. 🔹 OpenAI insists it is merely seeking evidence for its Musk lawsuit, not launching new legal actions. But the breadth and timing of the subpoenas suggest a strategic effort to suppress opposition. 🔮 What Comes Next? This campaign signals a new era of political hardball in the AI sector, where companies like OpenAI are willing to use legal tools to shape the regulatory landscape. With AI legislation advancing in California and at the federal level, expect more confrontations between tech giants and civil society groups. The outcome could define how power, transparency, and accountability are distributed in the AI age.

NEW: When OpenAI sent someone to Tyler Johnston's house, they wanted every text and email he had on the company. Tyler runs an AI watchdog, and he's just one of the people getting subpoenaed. This is just the beginning of the AI industry's aggressive new political strategy.

Oh, look, it's the anniversary of when the career I spent a decade building began to die because a single company decided that the entirety of the world's creative effort was theirs to take & exploit, forever ruining the internet & all concept of verifiable proof Ghouls FUVM

No one ever said things like "gatekeeping art" before AI came along. And now that AI is here, "gatekeeping art" is just PC doublespeak for "let me steal all the art I want."

Given that this is the team behind Stable Diffusion, people should really be asking what they're training their models on.

The @WhiteHouse faces a choice: 1) Support 'Team Human', & represent the interests of ordinary American families, or 2) Support 'Team VC', & represent the Bay Area venture capitalists & AI companies they're invested in. Pro tip: our 'AI Czar' @DavidSacks is not on Team Human

Didn't see this being discussed. Maybe I missed it. Throwing this out there: Netflix ‘all in’ on leveraging AI in its streaming platform cnbc.com/2025/10/22/netflix-… Netflix goes ‘all in’ on generative AI as entertainment industry remains divided | TechCrunch techcrunch.com/2025/10/21/ne…

*pretends to be shocked*

Wait… so users of OpenAI’s Atlas browser can opt-in the web pages they browse - *which belong to other people* - to AI training? Cool cool openai.com/index/introducing…

RT @kortizart: Workers cannot benefit from tech that functions by exploiting a group of workers. Creatives had their life’s work essentia…

OpenAI shouldn’t be able to exploit people’s copyright and then offer them a revenue share like it’s some sort of gracious offer. Some will take it, because it’s easier than suing a $500B company. But most would never have agreed to this before Sora launched. They would have (justifiably) demanded OpenAI pay for training on their IP, too, not just pay when their IP is outputted. It looks like OpenAI is trying to brute force their way past having to pay for training data. Release Sora, pressure people into taking a revenue share on the outputs, and therefore de facto escape lawsuits over the training. If OpenAI does escape those lawsuits, it is small creators who will suffer most. Sora + similar products, having exploited their work for training, will create videos that compete with them without re-using specific characters. On these videos, OpenAI will pay no one. IMO creatives’ best hope is that some big media companies reject OpenAI’s revenue share ‘offer’ and instead challenge the whole premise that outputs are all that need to be licensed.

RT @kortizart: Ah to be a venture capitalist, so free of self awareness, so deeply out of touch, you claim others—not you, the venture capi…

🚨 Read again: people will NOT be able to opt out of AI-led personalization. Meta's plans for an 'AI-augmented future' are utterly dystopian, and they seem to be just getting started. Fun fact: for now, the policy will not apply to the UK, the EU, or South Korea. To everyone who keeps insisting that the EU 'overregulates' tech: well, it actually works. It makes companies wary of full-blown public scrutiny and forces them to be more cautious, especially with sensitive features like this one. I find the combination of LLMs and ads extremely problematic, given how intimate people's conversations often are, and the potential for manipulation. I'll keep you posted. - 👉 Never miss my updates and analyses on AI: join my newsletter's 79,300+ subscribers.

This is the same excuse I seen when “what was she wearing”, “was she drunk”. ART IS NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN.

Huge amounts of money are being spent lobbying to deregulate AI. This is because AI companies & VCs know the public overwhelmingly supports AI regulation. Politicians must resist the money and side with the public. wsj.com/politics/silicon-val…

Please list a single "medium" that was engineered by exploiting the work of millions of creatives without permission or compensation to build an automated system that competes with those same creatives by mimicking their work. Photography? No. Printing presses? No. Looms? No. Automobiles? No. Because there aren't any. Also, count the libraries and really think about the impact the internet has on them. And yeah, oral tradition took a back seat to books. Books are NOT "more authentic" than oral tradition. You're so wrong, you don't even know how wrong you are. Everything you claim is wrong.

RT @kortizart: This is Showrunner AI, a startup that just a few weeks ago got Amazon funding to become the “Netflix of AI” as reported by F…

Anthropic got a narrow "Win" re fair use of LEGALLY ACQUIRED materials and now they're trying to claim that their VC-backed enterprises built on piracy is too important `because China` to face repercussions. They want copyright for themselves; but not you: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/…

🚨 If you’re in Australia, please give the Productivity Commission feedback on their plans to make it easier to train AI on copyrighted work without permission. (And try not to be swayed by the obvious bias of a question that highlights “the potentially massive economic benefits of AI” but not the harms of weakening creators’ rights.)