The AI Optimist

"I was searching this pirated database of books that have been taken off the internet, and it was bought by Meta in 2020..." That's how our story begins. Through Ann Handley's newsletter , I discovered an Atlantic article with a way to search the pirated LibGen database containing everything from Harry Potter to Stephen King — even Anne's books. A database Meta purchased in 2020. Search LibGen via...

"'I've always tried to understand the world underneath everything, because that's really what's going on, We live on the surface. And unfortunately, the culture that we live in is also absolutely obsessed with surface... But that isn't reality.' What you're looking at is more powerful than any legal argument. On the left, AI-generated "in the style of Geoffrey Laurence." On the right, an actual Ge...

That buzz when you discover something that feels right - that's how I felt about the UK's 'Make it Fair' campaign for creators' rights with AI. Web site © NMA Ltd’ or ‘Courtesy of NMA Ltd’. Then boom - nothing. Like creators trying to make up for lost time. And what’s “AI fair” varies depending on the country you are in… Like chasing a static object dancing in random neural networks. Or eating ove...

Ask about getting content back out of AI, I keep hearing, "AI is a black box. NO one understands." And...you accept that. After all, I’m not an engineer. Stuck in this AI Black Box myth - and told I wouldn't ever understand. Until a listener shared a comment that made me triple take. Dang. Now with the AI tools to detect and protect copyright, it's time to turn around and stop looking in the black...

What's Immortal, Always Hungry, and Sucking the Life Out of Creativity? I’ve been swimming with tech fear cycles for years. The internet destroys privacy (it did). Mobile phones make us antisocial – yup. Social media may wreck democracy maybe. Each wave brings fear, adapting, and moving forward. But something about AI fears feels different. "AI is a vampire," a friend complained over coffee. "It l...

In Tokyo right now, an AI can legally train on nearly everything created in Japan - books, songs, artwork - without permission or payment. This isn't science fiction; it's current Japanese copyright law. Step outside Japan's borders, and suddenly those same works may gain legal protection. This isn't theoretical - it's playing out in courtrooms today. The story of Ultraman - one of Japan's superhe...

Five years ago this Valentine's Day, OpenAI releases GPT-2; headlines later warn it’s 'too dangerous to release.' Their concern? That it could generate synthetic content at scale. Fast forward to 2025, and we're seeing the first major AI fair use victory in court - Thomson Reuters just won an early judgement protecting their platform's content from training a competitor’s AI, something courts rare...

What? Jackson Pollock Might Help Us Understand AI Copyright? I see Jackson Pollock's name in the US Copyright Office's announcement about AI this week, and I'm thinking - how did a 1950s painter who threw paint at canvases end up in a debate about artificial intelligence? From the US Copyright Office Someone tried to connect Pollock to AI in a way that made me stop and think: What if Pollock's pai...

Everyone's talking about DeepSeek building a ChatGPT competitor for $6M. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't – we'll see. But while we're arguing about AI chips and compute power, we're missing the real story: China is the only country on Earth that's actually protecting AI creativity. Not Silicon Valley with its billion-dollar legal battles. Not Europe with its complex regulations. Not Japan with it...

Over 20 major news publishers like NewsCorp, the Associated Press, and Vox Media have rushed to sign deals with OpenAI, with Vox calling it a "strategic content and product partnership." The stakes? OpenAI is offering between $1-5 million per year to license copyrighted content, with News Corp potentially securing $250 million over five years. But this isn't just about big media companies protecti...

An alien, AI, and a monkey walk into a copyright office. Each wants to register their creative work. Only one will get it….. One of them actually got the copyright. And it wasn't who you'd expect. Let's unpack this wild tale of three unlikely copyright seekers and see what it tells us about the future of AI and creativity. Get ready, this gets weird fast. Meet Our Contestants First up, we have Nar...

What's the one problem you're perfectly positioned to solve? Hard question, and one that demands answers. AI startups today are like architects trying to build an entire city before they've mastered a single room. Every feature becomes another building, every idea another street, until a little AI chaos - the unexpected edge cases - flummox it all up. You know, the stuff we don't expect. Soon thes...

RUTH: When AI Meets Purpose - A Different Kind of AI Startup Story In a tech bubble dominated by billion-dollar valuations and data-hungry AI models, one startup is charting a much different course. Meet RUTH, an AI-powered chatbot that helps people facing digital abuse and tech-enabled threats - and it does so without collecting a single piece of user data. A Mother's Question Out of Policy? The...

What I love most about covering AI this year? You learn way more by failing. Robert A. Heinlein: "Don't ever become a pessimist… a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun." Last Episode in 2024: The AI Optimist returns January 3, 2025 Those moments where we got it completely wrong - those 'wait, what?' moments that forced us to stop and really think. This final...

While the tech industry chases AI billions with promises of artificial general intelligence and superintelligent machines, a different story is unfolding in the startup layer. Entrepreneurs who focus on how people use technology are finding immediate success - not by selling AI dreams, but by solving real problems today. Richmond Alake, part of MongoDB’s culture of entrepreneurism in employees say...

I remember it so clearly, the Exhibitor’s booth with the simple name Ruth at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, away from the posturing about AGI and the next trillion-dollar unicorn. Megs Shah and Sandy Skelaney are doing something different and non-profit – Ruth is an AI app that does not track its users. And helps them use technology to protect themselves. Ask Ruth - Your Digital Guardian - Here Delivers...

In the midst of the AI glory days, in a room buzzing with the impact and momentum of the industry, no one seemed to care about copyrights except the speaker on the Disrupt stage. While watching Martin Casado of A16Z deftly handle questions about AI regulation – he stopped me by noting the importance of copyright to regulation. The room packed with the usual entrepreneurs, investors, and journalist...

From Art to AI: How Generative Models Are Reinventing Advertising The advertising industry is about to experience its AWS moment. Just as cloud computing transformed IT from a capital-intensive hardware business into an API-driven software model, AI is pivoting advertising from a labor-intensive creative process into a model-driven generation engine. At the center of this Generative Experience exp...

In a dimly lit conference room in San Francisco, tech executives are huddled around a whiteboard, sketching out complex diagrams of AI safety protocols. Across town, researchers are debugging thousands of lines of code meant to teach AI systems ethics. And in Washington, politicians debate new regulations for artificial intelligence. They're all missing something hiding in plain sight. At Valory,...

AI adoption, especially at the enterprise level, is stuck in neutral. Tons of promise, and challenges - how can we all align AI incentives with our customers, when we don’t know what the next 2 years will bring. We're thinking about AI adoption all wrong, over promising and under performing the hype. Yes it’s software, but it’s not software from 1989, and that’s still quietly how it’s being treate...

We're thinking about AI all wrong, and I'm going to tell you why. While Silicon Valley buzzes about billion-dollar AI valuations and enterprises rush to "AI-enable" their legacy software, they're missing something fundamental: AI isn't just another tool in the software stack – it's an entirely new platform making much of traditional software obsolete. Think about this simple example I shared with...

Imagine waking up one day with a complete blank slate - no memories, no sense of who you are or where you've been. That's exactly what happened to Dan Thomson, CEO of Sensay.io , when a brutal concussion robbed him of two entire days of his life. This jarring experience set Dan on a path that would eventually lead him to the cutting edge of AI technology. While his journey began with a personal cr...

The billionaire AI game is on, with OpenAI scoring $6 billion while burning $5 billion.faster than a Tesla on ludicrous mode. In the other corner, Fathom, a scrappy upstart that's actually, you know, making money. The kind you should listen to, based on building businesses by listening to their customers who love them so much, they invested $2M in Fathom. Today, we're dissecting these two AI growt...

With all the hype about AI, it feels like being in a sci-fi movie where the robots are taking over, or more likely Big Tech? That’s part of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) pitch! It's like we're all waiting for Skynet to become self-aware, but our current AI can't even outsmart your average house cat. That's right - your fur baby lounging on the couch is probably smarter than the most advanc...

Forget the ChatGPT hype. Forget the endless debates about AGI. Meet a true visionary in the tech world, Massoud Alibakhsh, CEO and co-founder of Omadeus . Massoud's here to tell us why we've been looking at AI all wrong, and how a simple shift in perspective could revolutionize the way we build and use software. "Intelligence is embedded in everything in our world. We are living in distributive in...