Food and drink

Take one cup of IP, stir vigorously: the latest fight over copying cookbook recipes is a story as old as food

- May 2, 2025 4 MIN READ

Plagiarism accusations against Brooke Bellamy, first brought to light by Nagi Maehashi on her website RecipeTin Eats, continue to emerge. This week, it was reported that Bellamy has been dropped as an ambassador for the Academy for Enterprising Girls’ program for young girls in business. And a second cookbook author has come forward. High-profile US baker,… Read more »

AI/Machine Learning

Meta used pirated books by Australian authors to train its AI and now US courts may decide if this is ‘fair use’

- April 2, 2025 5 MIN READ

Companies developing AI models, such as OpenAI and Meta, train their systems on enormous datasets. These consist of text from newspapers, books (often sourced from unauthorised repositories), academic publications and various internet sources. The material includes works that are copyrighted. The Atlantic magazine recently alleged Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had used LibGen,… Read more »

Mark Zuckerberg
Leadership

Zuck you all. Meta’s boss is back in steal mode

- March 25, 2025 4 MIN READ

This year marks 20 years since Mark Zuckberg launched Facebook, having kicked it off as The Facebook in 2004. He was already notorious for Facemash, the “hot or not” site that ranked Harvard students by their attractiveness, which he created in late 2003. Zuckerberg hacked into house face book websites at the university to get… Read more »

AI/Machine Learning

Did China’s DeepSeek just drive the karma bus straight into US AI’s house?

- January 30, 2025 4 MIN READ

The British feminist writer Angela Carter wrote that “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people”. And right now, quite a few people are chuckling at a tragedy that’s befallen OpenAI amid claims that Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek “stole” the US startup’s data to train its large language model (LLM), R1. A quick recap… Read more »

AI/Machine Learning

Record companies are suing music apps for copying classic songs in a legal battle that will shape the future of generative AI

- July 3, 2024 3 MIN READ

Last month, several major record labels filed copyright infringement lawsuits in US courts against the makers of two generative AI music apps, Suno and Udio. The labels allege the AI companies have engaged in copyright infringement by copying many sound recordings belonging to the record labels, and producing outputs very similar to those recordings. The… Read more »

The Treachery of Images, by Rene Magritte (1929)
AI/Machine Learning

The Artist Strikes Back: How creative people are using ‘data poisoning’ to fight generative AI

- December 19, 2023 3 MIN READ

Imagine this. You need an image of a balloon for a work presentation and turn to a text-to-image generator, like Midjourney or DALL-E, to create a suitable image. You enter the prompt: “red balloon against a blue sky” but the generator returns an image of an egg instead. You try again but this time, the… Read more »

Richard Flanagan
AI/Machine Learning

AI is stealing from Australian authors to make its owners even richer

- October 5, 2023 2 MIN READ

Australian authors have been caught up in a major controversy around the data used to train large language models after an investigation uncovered 183,000 pirated books were included in a commonly used dataset called Books3. Booker Prize winning novelist Richard Flanagan was among the Australian writers whose works were in the dataset that was reportedly… Read more »

Global tech

Book publishers v the Internet Archive: why the world’s biggest online library is in a legal fight over digital lending

- July 21, 2022 4 MIN READ

Earlier this month, the Internet Archive asked a US court to end a lawsuit filed against it by four large book publishers. The Internet Archive is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1996 that lends digital copies of books, music, movies and other digitised content to the public. It aims to support people with print disabilities,… Read more »