The Intelligence Heist

An insider’s gripping account of how today’s AI gold rush was driven by the biggest theft of creative work the world has ever seen. The Intelligence Heist tells the riveting story of how the world’s creative work was stolen to power the rise of artificial intelligence. Building AI systems that can generate text, images, and music requires three key resources: brilliant researchers to build the models, enormous computing power to drive them, and huge amounts of data to train them. Even as AI companies have spent unimaginably vast sums on people and chips, they have mostly taken their “training data” for free. In recent years, they have fed billions of creative works—the life’s work of countless uncompensated and often unknowing writers, artists, and musicians—into their models to be imitated again and again. Ed Newton-Rex, after years spent building AI, is now a leader in the fight against this theft. In these pages, he vividly unfolds the dramatic inside story that AI companies don’t want you to know. It’s a story of corner-cutting executives turning to shadowy “pirate libraries,” of billion-dollar lawsuits and politicians under fire, of corporate exploitation and struggling artists fighting back. At stake, Newton-Rex reveals, is not just the future of AI but the future of human creativity itself.