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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · 2d

Last week we talked with the next generation of UK film & TV talent at the Soho Media Club's BeYou Festival in London. Guests included Ash Atalla and Oscar-winning triple threat Rachel Shenton

au-works.com/this-years-b...

This year’s Be You Festival convened diverse creatives to plot a new future for UK media - Moving fast & fixing things in the creative industries

Guests included producer Ash Atalla who revealed what he really thinks about the industry's not-fit-for-purpose commissioning system.

au-works.com

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · 9d

Today we’re at the Be You Festival in #London, by Soho Media Club, featuring guests like the great Ash Atalla.

Attendees here are figuring out the future of UK media. They’ll get back to you.

Producer Ash Atalla talks with moderator Muki Kulhan in an onstage interview at Soho Media Club’s Be You Festival in London.

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Queer Zest Zine Fest @queerzestzinefest.bsky.social · 18d

The Queer Zest Zine Fest final weekend is filled with zesty queerness! Come meet the zinesters, hear their stories, shop from them. Allies welcome.

✨ Saturday, September 27, 2025 ✨

Kelci Crawford
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

Oneironaut 17
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM EDT
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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · 19d

"There is a continual arms race in content safety, with pirates sooner or later finding ways to get around new technologies"

Check out our piece on the tech challenges of keeping you intellectual property safe in the latest issue of ¡AU! Journal:

heyzine.com/flip-book/e3...

Article from ¡AU! Journal, Autumn 2025 - "IP Predators: The tech arms race against packs of pirates" by Neal Romanek 1/6

Standfirst: Content piracy is happening worldwide
on an industrial scale. Protecting copyright is a battle that never ends

"What we see is increasingly connected to organized crime,” said Miruna Herovanu, Executive Director of the AAPA, at ¡AU!’s Content & IP Defense Summit in June about the ever-growing threat of content piracy. “It’s an organized network that takes place in many countries.”

The AAPA (Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance) is an EU organization fighting piracy through lobbying, law enforcement, and partnerships. Its working groups focus on hosting infrastructure, social media, artificial intelligence, and piracy disruption. Members include Canal+ Group, beIN Sports, DAZN, the Premier League and Sky, plus tech providers like Friend MTS, Irdeto, Verimatrix and Synamedia.

In 2022, an AAPA study, “The impact of illicit IPTV in Europe” calculated that in the previous year, rights holders in the EU and UK lost €3.21 billion to IPTV piracy alone, while pirates made €1.1 billion in revenue. The report also estimated that in 2021, 4.5% of the EU/UK population used illicit IPTV services. Users of those services spent, on average, a bargain €5.22 per month.

Herovanu has worked in European trade associations and regulators her entire career, with a special focus on intellectual property and copyright. She sees education as an important part of the AAPA’s strategy.

Pirates are often legally as well as technologically sophisticated, taking advantage of the differences in legal frameworks across countries to circumvent some copyright regulations.

“Also there’s the training of law enforcement on the specificities of these crimes, which are very technical and complicated. And there are different legal regimes, because copyright is territorial.”

Earlier this year a report published by Enders Analysis accused the big tech companies of..."

Article from ¡AU! Journal, Autumn 2025 - "IP Predators: The tech arms race against packs of pirates" by Neal Romanek 3 & 4 of 6 - with a video play window from the ¡AU! Content & IP Security Summit

"...a year’s worth of security audits to allow our CoralOS to transmit live streams.”

There is a continual arms race in content safety, with pirates sooner or later finding ways to get around new technologies. Different approaches are required for live delivery versus OTT or on-demand. While the protection of live content can often be managed by the latest delivery technologies, OTT relies more on a wider distribution network that is upgraded only gradually.

“With OTT, you are working with technologies that are three, four or five years old, which have already been exploited and that’s where the breaches come.”

OPEN OR CLOSED, You’re vulnerable

Ammirata’s experience heading up the RIST Forum, which promotes an open source, open-specification video transport protocol, has attuned him to tradeoffs between easy universally accessible tools and security needs. The transparency of open source tools means hackers know what the vulnerabilities are upfront—and can exploit them.

“Open source, by itself, isn’t necessarily secure,” he told the Summit. “It’s up to the mplementor to harden it. A lot of times you see open source workflows, but they haven’t closed the holes in them. Or they did close the holes but did it years ago in the first version of the application, and they haven’t kept up with the updates.”

Continuously upgrading and patching software, open source or not, is just good hygiene when it comes to preventing attacks. But open source software, because of generally slower development times, suffers from a longer updates cycles.

Closed-source software, which does not have the public-facing record of updates, vulnerabilities or versioning, is generally assumed to be more hacker resistant. But this is based on “security by obscurity”, assuming..."

Article from ¡AU! Journal, Autumn 2025 - "IP Predators: The tech arms race against packs of pirates" by Neal Romanek 5 & 6 of 6 with spooky illustrations of wolves

"...If you look at security, you see everything is encrypted based on the owner’s keys. We've been involved in a successful major pilot this summer with one of the biggest leagues in the world. Those sessions are under their control, end-to-end.”

CLAIMING WHAT’S YOURS

Dr. Manny Ahmed, founder of OpenOrigins and a researcher at the University of Cambridge, has been tackling the content control problem from the point of view of content provability, particularly important in a world of material infuenced by AI. Authenticating provenance of content at its source is a key part of the OpenOrigins toolkit and includes authenticating pre-existing IP libraries.

“There is a lot of attention focused on content that is being created now or in the future, but no one was thinking in depth about what we do with all this historical content,” said Ahmed.

“How do we know that your version of Obama’s speech from 2008 is the real one, when we could create an alternative version that looks just as photorealistic?”

Organizations like C2PA are working on methodologies to certify the provenance of content, but these still rely ultimately on the authority of a specific organization of individual. OpenOrigins aims for a solution for content authentication that is decentralized that doesn’t have to refer to gatekeepers or nodes of authority.

“I think C2PA is fine if you are working within a very limited information silo,” noted Ahmed. “If you are in an organization and you have end to end control over what software everyone is using. But the moment you put it on Twitter and someone takes a screenshot, the metadata gets ripped out. You have similar issues with water-marking, which is always going to be an arms race.”

With OpenOrigins, blockchain is used to store proof information as content is ingested..."

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Dr Surekha Davies (she/her) @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social · 25d

Online conversations on #monsters in the creative arts and sciences! Come chat with me and ceramicist and monster Esti Reich on October 18, 2-4pm UK (8-10am ET). Tickets now available.
#art #arthistory #sculpture #histsci #histmed #sff

¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · 27d

¡AU! has launched a new event series, MONSTER LAB, where creatives of all types (from painters to brain surgeons) gather to talk monsters & see what we can learn.

First MONSTER LAB is Oct. 18, 2-4pm UK time, online. Get your ticket now!

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/monster-la...

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · 27d

Our special guests will be historian & monster expert @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social and sculptor Esti Reich.

Front cover of the book "Humans: A Monstrous History" by Surekha Davies

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · 27d

¡AU! has launched a new event series, MONSTER LAB, where creatives of all types (from painters to brain surgeons) gather to talk monsters & see what we can learn.

First MONSTER LAB is Oct. 18, 2-4pm UK time, online. Get your ticket now!

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/monster-la...

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Sep 12

Low carbon, all disco.

Yesterday’s festivities on The Flint Green Line to #IBC2025

Neal Romanek @nromanek.bsky.social · Sep 12

Yesterday a Eurostar carriage of media industry tech geniuses - plus me - partied from London to Amsterdam on the way to week’s big #IBCShow. It’s called The Flint Green Line. We hatched it when I was at The Flint last year to promote green travel to media biz trade shows.

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Sep 8

...Irritatingly, our digital magazine provider appears to be down right now. Working to restore service as frantically as strongly worded emails will allow.

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Sep 8

And you can read the digital version of the magazine right now, right here: au-works.com/au-journal-a...

¡AU! Journal – Autumn 2025 - Moving fast & fixing things in the creative industries

Issue Two of ¡AU! Journal looks at the crisis of content theft and destruction - from pirates, hackers and ravenous AI.

au-works.com

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Reposted by ¡AU!

Neal Romanek @nromanek.bsky.social · Sep 8

The big reveal! A first look at the print version of ¡AU! Journal, which we'll be distributing at the IBC Show this week in Amsterdam, one of the world's biggest trade shows for tech/tools for media & broadcast. @auworks.bsky.social will be making its IBC debut. DM me a line if you want to meet up!

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Reposted by ¡AU!

Dr Surekha Davies (she/her) @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social · Sep 6

Folks interested in #monsters and culture! #SFF and #art folks! I'm speaking in an online MONSTER LAB alongside ceramicist and monster sculptor Esti Reich! Oct 18 online.

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Sep 6

Our guests will be @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social, author of Humans: A Monstrous History, and Esti Reich, ceramicist & monster sculptor.

Cover of book Humans: A Monstrous History by Surekha Davies

Four whimsical, colorful ceramic monsters made by Esti Reich.

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Sep 5

Read the article in the digital edition of the magazine HERE: heyzine.com/flip-book/e3...

¡AU! Journal - Autumn 2025 | PDF to Flipbook

Issue Two of ¡AU! Journal looks at the crisis of content theft and destruction – from pirates, hackers and ravenous AI.. PDF to flipbook converted using heyzine.com

heyzine.com

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Sep 5

And use the QR code to watch our interview with Graham Lovelace, an expert on Gen AI's effect on the media industry.

Subscribe to ¡AU! Journal - free! - here: dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/131217...

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Sep 5

From the new issue of ¡AU! Journal: "Content by no one, for no one: Surviving the #AI bubble" - an overview of the top threats #GenAI content poses to creative businesses, including erosion of trust, damage to integrity & financial instability.

From ¡AU! Journal, Autumn 2025 - "Content by no one, for no one: Surviving the Gen AI bubble" by Neal Romanek 1/6

Standfirst: Can the media & entertainment sector put the brakes on its toxic relationship with Gen AI?

Background image is a colorful image of a landscape in the style of a Dr. Seuss illustration.

In small type at the bottom of the page:

"Photo by ChatGPT
Prompt: In the style of Dr. Seuss
a hilly landscape covered in Truffula tree"

From ¡AU! Journal - "Content by no one, for no one: Surviving the Gen AI bubble" by Neal Romanek 2/6

On a black bg with colorful Seussian trees

'"The creative spirit of humanity is an incredibly important thing. And we want to build tools that lift that up, that make it so new people can create better art—better content, write better novels that we all enjoy. I do believe that humans will be at the center of that.

“I also believe that we need to figure out some sort of new model on the economics of creative output. I think there are incredible new business models that we and others are excited to explore...”

Thus spoke Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI at TED early this year.

he interview has been watched1.7 million times at this writing.

OpenAI, you will recall, is a company founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk and other online technology experts in 2015 “with the goal of building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity”.

The OpenAI founders are all pretty smart people. Neither Sam Altman nor OpenAI President Greg Brockman graduated from university, which is certainly evidence of just how smart they are.

Smart people graduate from Stanford. Really, really smart people drop out. Apparently.

rockman actually dropped out of two elite universities, so that may make him some extra extra smart.

In 2023, Altman and Brockman also both dropped out of their own company when they were offered a sweet deal to leave OpenAI for a new AI team at Microsoft. The two were quickly lured back to their alma mater by shareholders where they remain, for now.

It would be churlish not to admit that Gen AI has positive qualities. But fidelity and integrity are not among them.

I gives the appearance of performing great feats mostly because we can’t see what goes on behind the scenes. We can’t see what’s happening in the kitchen.

So here is a quick recap of how your favorite Gen AI tool actually works (spoiler: there is no kitchen): ...'

From ¡AU! Journal - "Content by no one, for no one: Surviving the Gen AI bubble" by Neal Romanek 3/6

On a black bg with a couple Seussian trees & severed tree trunks

"HOW GEN AI ACTUALLY WORKS

Gen AI works like a wacky restaurant from a Dr. Seuss story.

Imagine you’re sitting at your eat-a-ma-thing. You type out what you would like to eat. You describe it in detail.

What then happens is your fancy robot waiter zips downstairs into a deep vault containing every imaginable thing that could be eaten.

The owners of the restaurant have travelled the world and stolen every version of every sandwich and pie and salad and crab fried rice and stored them in a temperature-controlled facility as big as Ireland.

Speeding through the vault, your robot waiter picks a meal off the shelf which looks closest to the meal you described. It zips back up to the restaurant and presents that meal to you.

You are delighted. You say “My compliments to the chef. He’s a genius. Just like Sam Altman.”

Of course the chef is not a genius. There is no chef. There is only a vault filled with every meal that anyone has ever made.

You decide you would like your meal with pepper on it. But the robot waiter doesn’t add pepper. What it does is zip back down to the vault and find a version of your meal with pepper on it, which has also been waiting in the vault, all this time, ready to go.

If you would like even more pepper, the robot waiter does not add even more pepper. It goes back and finds yet another version of the meal, with even more pepper, that has also been stored in the vault all this time.

If you decide you want to add ice cream, the waiter doesn’t go and retrieve ice cream. It goes and retrieves the version of your meal (with the extra extra pepper) with ice cream this time

The reason your waiter can bring back your meal so quickly is it uses a jetpack powered by truffula trees.

Alright, so Gen AI doesn’t actually work like that..." (more)

From ¡AU! Journal - "Content by no one, for no one: Surviving the Gen AI bubble" by Neal Romanek 4/6

On a black bg with a few Seussian trees & many severed tree trunks, plus an image from The Lorax (2012) of the Onceler.

"THE AI THREATS

Lovelace explained to the Summit that the threats that
AI poses to content businesses fall roughly into three main categories:

I. Erosion of trust

The ability for anyone, anywhere to instantaneously produce highly convincing text, image, audio and video content interferes with our ability to tell what is true.

en AI content can be very convincing—you could say its primary purpose is to be convincing. Even when we intellectually know what we’re seeing isn’t true, our brain still may still register it as a real event, something we have an opinion and feelings about. Remember the clip of Volodymyr Zelensky knocking out Donald Trump with a right hook—and the subsequent surge of well-being one felt?

We react to what we see viscerally, before the rational mind can step in to explain that what we’ve seen isn’t real.

Knowing this, and knowing that realistic AI imagery is running loose in the media ecosystem, we may start to experience doubt about what we see. Even blatantly obvious attempts to fool people can do a lot of damage before they are debunked The week of this writing, a deep fake video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in which she appeared to criticize to absurd extremes a controversial American Eagle jeans ad, was amplified by television host Chris Cuomo. On social media, Cuomo used the video, which he thought was real, as an opportunity to attack AOC.

Cuomo was ridiculed online, by AOC among others, for falling for the deep fake. He delivered an apology on his show, which included: “I was wrong...but what is right?”

With deep fakes and AI generated content becoming part of regular discourse, it becomes equally easy to ridicule genuine footage as fake AI content..." (more)

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Sep 2

"Real psychologists don't respond to people two minutes after a request with 12 carefully crafted paragraphs of copy"

Read about journalist Rob Waugh's hunt for non-existent influencers, who are quoted in real newspapers, in the latest new of ¡AU! Journal...

heyzine.com/flip-book/e3...

Image of article from ¡AU! Journal - On The Trail Of The Ghost Influencers, written by Neal Romanek (though there is no byline on article) 1/4 -

'I was approached by a guest blogger,” recalls Rob Waugh. “But there were no traces of that person on the internet, just dead ends. I thought: This person doesn’t exist.”

That was the unsettling moment that started UK tech journalist Waugh on his ongoing investigations into a world where nonexistent experts are making PR agencies and publishers real money.

His breakthrough was the discovery of a second “ghost influencer” when he sent out a call for a psychologist who could give an opinion for an article he was writing— ironically as it turned out—on the impact of identify theft.

One of those who responded, called Barbara Santini, had already been quoted numerous times in major media publications, including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and UK papers The Sun, The Daily Mail, and Metro.

But when Waugh began browsing through Santini’s credentials, he was surprised to find that, despite her claiming a master’s degree in Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics from University of Oxford, the only verifiable links to any professional work were with online sex shop Peaches and Screams and some CBD brands. The photo pictured here was used across that handful of profiles.

There were other things that seemed suspicious to Waugh: “Real psychologists don’t respond to people two minutes after a request with twelve carefully crafted paragraphs of copy.”

Santini’s bio at Peaches and Screams paints a vivid picture of someone “on a mission to make sex advice as accessible as a good cup of tea and to shatter taboos across all cultural corners. When she's not busy revolutionizing the way we talk about sex, Barbara’s diving into her delightfully eccentric hobbies. She floats her way through yoga classes (yes, on water!), hunts down the most fabulous vintage fashion finds, and loves cracking the codes in escape rooms.”

Image of article from ¡AU! Journal - On The Trail Of The Ghost Influencers 2/4 -

Digging deeper, Waugh began to suspect that Santini, not only wasn’t an Oxford-educated psychologist, but that she wasn’t a real person. Looking at her writing samples, he spotted clues that her content could be the creation of AI. Writing subheads in title-case was one subtle peculiarity. It’s a US stylistic standard, and one that a professional UK journalist would be unlikely to use (UK style favors sentence-case). For a chatbot like Chat GPT, trained on American content, it would be fairly typical output.

Santini’s insights and quotes appeared in lifestyle pieces that covered a spectrum or topics—“Cringey or cute?: Top couples' pet names revealed” or “The signs you're primarily attracted to intelligence over looks – and why it can be considered controversial” or “What happens if you don’t cry? Is stopping tears bad?”

“Santini would comment on anything,” says Waugh. “She can create comments instantly, using ChatGPT, because she doesn’t exist.”

Waugh finally tracked down the home base for Barbara Santini’s expertise.

“I looked into who owned the company that she worked for. I realized that Barbara Santini was actually two Lithuanian men who owned a chain of CBD brands and sex shops and who, I believe, employed a blogger in Nairobi who sent out the copy by email.”

e fake industrial complex

Waugh flagged the fake to the referral service ResponseSource, an agency connecting media outlets with experts and sources for almost every topic imaginable. Services like ResponseSource will often get their expert sources through PR agencies, rarely with diligent vetting of the experts put forward. As long as the PR agency pays its bill, few questions are asked.

“ResponseSource said ‘We’ve given the person a final warning.” Waugh laughs. “Why have they given them a final warning? The person doesn’t exist.”

In partnership with Press Gazette, Waugh published a full investigation...

Image of article from ¡AU! Journal - On The Trail Of The Ghost Influencers - 3/4 - also contains an video thumbnail image and QR code for accessing the video

'...generate fake expert content, that make the idea of individual ghost influencer seem quaint. Now there are networks that produce thousands of AI-generated publications which, from server to screen, never pass through a human being.

“They spew news 24/7 with the goal of getting onto Google Discover. Some of the people who operate these have become millionaires. These fake publications are outranking real ones staffed by human journalists.”

Some news outlets are tightening up the verification process for experts, although it often falls on individual journalists to do the actual legwork. Yahoo News, for example, now requires two kinds of ID verification for any expert a freelancer quotes in a piece.

News networks have also sent out warnings for journalists not to automatically trust experts provided by services like ResponseSource, where their identity cannot be independently verified. ResponseSource is also reportedly upgrading its protocols for expert authenticity.

In a world where content can be monetized by consistently hitting certain algorithmic targets at scale, these fixes still duck the main problem of a system that rewards dumping hard-won, but time-consuming and expensive, human expertise.

“The time pressure on journalists to deliver yards and yards in increasingly less time of copy for increasingly less money means we’re more vulnerable.

“The financial motivation for doing this is extremely real. And journalists are going to deal with more and more fake people.”' (ends)

Image of article from ¡AU! Journal - On The Trail Of The Ghost Influencers - 4/4 -

Silhouette of a collapses marionette

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Aug 29

Special thanks to our sponsors & supporters, including Friend MTS, RIST Forum, IBC Show, HAND (Human & Digital), and Proofmode.

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Aug 29

The launch pad for this issue was the superb discussion at our Content & IP Defense Summit in June. Thanks to our participants, including @nathan.freitas.net @hsvela.bsky.social @felipedana.bsky.social @glovelace.bsky.social, Miruna Herovanu, Manny Ahmed, Sergio Ammirata, Will Kreth & Rob Waugh!

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Aug 29

The next issue of ¡AU! Journal is out now! In this one we cover content security and how creative businesses are protecting themselves and their intellectual propertt from pirates, hackers and ravenous AI's.

Read the digital magazine now:

au-works.com/au-journal-a...

¡AU! Journal – Autumn 2025 - Moving fast & fixing things in the creative industries

Issue Two of ¡AU! Journal looks at the crisis of content theft and destruction - from pirates, hackers and ravenous AI.

au-works.com

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Reposted by ¡AU!

Asher Hellbein @asherelbein.bsky.social · Jul 29

Hey, writers! We're commissioning guest essays at HEAT DEATH. We want to showcase your weird deep dives into history, ecology and culture, and intersections between them. We pay a $75 honorarium per piece, edit carefully, and you keep all rights.

Pitch me at aelbein@gmail!

Heat Death

A newsletter about yesterday, tomorrow, and all the crises in between.

heat-death.ghost.io

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Reposted by ¡AU!

NPR @npr.org · Jul 28

Congress eliminated public media funding, and the president signed it into law. At a time of deep division, public media brings us together.

Help keep it strong. Join our monthly donors today: n.pr/458sOhq

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Jul 16

Often the straightforward response is the best.

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Jul 16

And you can read an analysis of the conversation in the new issue of our magazine ¡AU! Journal: 📖

heyzine.com/flip-book/fc...

¡AU! Journal - Summer 2025 | PDF to Flipbook

The debut issue of ¡AU!'s quarterly magazine covers the struggle to preserve diversity initiatives in the media & entertainment industry. PDF to flipbook converted using heyzine.com

heyzine.com

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¡AU! @auworks.bsky.social · Jul 16

Watch this chat from our Emergency DEI Summit on getting diverse talent into craft roles - plus a primer on training & education as a human right. That's right. You have a right to training & education. 🏋‍♀️

Features the fabulous Simon Devereux, Amanda Sapp & Ellen Walker.

youtu.be/ocWxf2PlQfk?...

"How to rise when you're below the line" - Session 3 at ¡AU!'s Emergency DEI Summit

YouTube video by ¡AU!

youtu.be

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