Anti-AIPerson

Ed Newton-Rex

Composer & Founder of Fairly Trained

The AI-music pioneer who resigned as Stability AI’s audio VP in 2023 because he could not accept that training on copyrighted work is “fair use” — then founded Fairly Trained to certify companies that license their data.

Musician Executive Tech Entertainment

Wikipedia Fairly Trained

In his words

I’ve resigned from my role leading the Audio team at Stability AI, because I don’t agree with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is ‘fair use’.

— X, 2023

Companies worth billions of dollars are, without permission, training generative AI models on creators’ works, which are then being used to create new content that in many cases can compete with the original works.

— Music Business Worldwide, 2023

Biography

Ed Newton-Rex is a British composer and one of generative AI’s actual pioneers: he founded Jukedeck, one of the first AI music-composition startups, in 2012, sold it to TikTok owner ByteDance in 2019, and went on to lead the audio team at Stability AI, where he shipped the Stable Audio generator. A published choral composer, he has lived on both sides of the training-data question — as a builder of the models and a creator whose work feeds them.

The resignation heard across the industry

In November 2023, after Stability told the US Copyright Office that training on copyrighted works is “an acceptable, transformative, and socially-beneficial use” protected by fair use, Newton-Rex quit publicly, writing that he could not see how exploiting creators’ life’s work without permission — to build products that compete with them — could be acceptable in a society whose creative economics rest on copyright. Notably, his own Stable Audio had been trained on licensed data, proving the alternative was possible.

In January 2024 he launched Fairly Trained, a nonprofit that certifies generative AI companies that license their training data rather than scrape it. He also organized the 2024 statement declaring the unlicensed use of creative works for AI training “a major, unjust threat” to creators’ livelihoods, which gathered tens of thousands of signatories including Kazuo Ishiguro and Björn Ulvaeus. TIME named him to its TIME100 AI list in 2025.

His stance carries a crucial nuance: he is emphatically pro-generative-AI — he spent a decade building it — and anti-theft. His argument is that consent and licensing are not obstacles to the technology but the condition of its legitimacy.