UK Government's AI Plan Sparks Controversy Over Copyright and Creative Industries

Labour's AI plan could be good for Britain - except the creatives it will throw under the bus | Ed Newton-Rex

The proposed new law will hand over artists' copyright so their competitors can be trained for free. The government must reconsider On Monday morning, a couple of hours after the UK government's AI opportunities action plan was published, I started getting messages from artists. "We are not going to continue drawing so that the founders of [AI companies] can get rich. I am quitting this job now," said one. Another told me: "I have given up at this point." I've heard similar messages from people for months - they are abandoning their creative jobs because AI companies are taking their work without asking, and using it to train models that compete with them. There is actually a lot I agree with in the action plan, which seeks to make the UK a global leader in artificial intelligence. Written by the venture capital investor Matt Clifford, it proposes making it easier for British AI companies to access "compute" (essentially the servers needed to train AI models), updating visa regulations to bring more AI experts to our shores, and much more besides. These are sensible ideas that could boost our economy. But the recommendation that has created despondency among artists concerns copyright. Clifford proposes that copyright law be reformed to favour AI companies. He seems to align himself with the government's recent proposal that we hand our creators' copyrighted works - their art, their music, their books - to AI companies, for them to train their technology on, free of charge, unless creators proactively opt out. In essence, this means flipping copyright on its head, so that every work in British creative history will become usable by AI companies unless its creators go through some as-yet-undefined process to say they'd rather that didn't happen. It is easy to see why this has been received poorly by British creators. If you train a large language model on short stories, it can write new short stories; if you train AI on pop music, it can write new pop music. The proposal lets AI companies take people's work and use it to build highly scalable AI models that will outcompete them. We already know that generative AI is reducing the demand for human creative work. This proposal will dramatically accelerate that process. Let's say I want to set up a new company. We'll call it Great British AI. Our mission is simple: to replace the country's creators with AI. Doing so is easy. We will scrape the internet for any and all creative work by British creators. We'll respect opt-outs, but hardly anyone ever opts out when given the chance. We will use the work we scrape to train cutting-edge AI models. And we will use these models to generate and sell vast amounts of new work in similar styles for a fraction of the cost. Running a business such as this is currently, and rightly, illegal in the UK. It is clearly hugely exploitative. Under the new proposals, though, it becomes legal. I don't think the government intends this to be the outcome. I don't think it wants to put large swathes of the creative industries out of work by legalising theft. But this is what will happen if its proposals are enacted. The core issue is that opt-outs of the kind outlined here are unfair and unworkable. Here's an example. I write choral compositions, which are distributed by a music publisher. A choir buys the sheet music and records one of my pieces. That recording is broadcast on the radio. Can I opt out of the recording being used for AI training? Of course not. From the moment I publish the piece, I have no control whatsoever over who uses it, for what purpose. And this applies to a million pieces of media, across the creative industries. You can only opt out where you control your work - but, most of the time, you don't. The US has a much fairer solution: "fair use". Some unlicensed uses of copyrighted works are allowed, and some aren't. Whether a given use is permitted is determined by a number of factors - and, critically, one of these is the competitive effect that use has on the original. The proposal in the UK totally misses this nuance, instead opting for a blunt copyright exception that would do an incredible amount of damage. But what is most frustrating is that there is no real need to change copyright law at all. The UK can be a global leader in AI by adopting Clifford's other recommendations, which are ambitious and laudable. Lots of AI - the type the government cares about, such as in healthcare, science and defence - is not trained on the work of the world's creators. The work that won Demis Hassabis the Nobel prize last year, AlphaFold, wasn't - it was trained on a database of protein structures. The only upside to upending copyright law in the manner proposed is attracting a few large, foreign AI companies to set up offices here. These are the companies that have been lobbying the government heavily for this change. They are also, incidentally, some of the companies that have ecstatically welcomed the action plan. Disappointingly, it seems the government has "committed to implement" Clifford's recommendation to reform copyright, along with his other recommendations. This throws the government's consultation on AI and copyright, which still has six weeks to run, into disarray. Why engage with a consultation if the government has already made up its mind? I think that Clifford has the country's best interests at heart with this action plan. But his is not the only voice that should be heard. The government should listen to Paul McCartney, Kate Mosse, Kate Bush and the countless other musicians, actors, writers, artists and other creators who - quite understandably - reject the notion that AI companies should be able to use their works, unlicensed, to build their competitors. I hope the government will reconsider. It would surely not be a ruinous U-turn to implement49 of the 50 recommendations. Doing so is the only way to ensure that the UK's AI industry and creative industries can both equally prosper.

British novelists criticise government over AI 'theft'

Kate Mosse and Richard Osman say plan to mine artistic works for data would destroy creative fields Bestselling novelists Kate Mosse and Richard Osman have hit back at the government's apparent plan to give artificial intelligence companies broad freedoms to mine artistic works for data, warning it could "destroy" growth in creative fields and amount to "theft". They spoke out after the prime minister, Keir Starmer, on Monday launched a national drive to make the UK "one of the great AI superpowers" and endorsed a 50-point action plan that included reform of how AI firms can use copyrighted text and data to train their models. The government had been consulting on whether to allow the major technology companies to hoover up massive quantities of writing, music and other creative works unless copyright holders actively opt out. It is seen as a way of supercharging the growth of AI companies in the UK. Huge volumes of data are needed to train AI models and technology firms claim copyright laws create uncertainty which risks holding back development. But creatives want AI companies to pay and were dismayed when Starmer said he backed calls for a system similar to the EU which requires copyright holders to opt out of the trawling process. The Creative Rights in AI coalition, which includes industry groups in music, publishing, journalism, TV, cinema and photography, on Tuesday called the PM's position "deeply concerning" and called on ministers to continue to consider their case to keep the current copyright system. Last month Paul McCartney warned that AI "could just take over", and Kate Bush joined Stephen Fry and Hugh Bonneville in signing a petition warning that the "unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted". On Tuesday, Mosse told the Guardian: "Using AI responsibly and well and being a world leader - all of this I agree with. It just cannot be at the expense of the creative industries ... It is supporting one type of growth and destroying another part of growth. And it cannot be on the basis of theft of our work." Osman, who has sold more than 10 million books with his Thursday Murder Club series, said: "A lot of the issues around AI are complex, but this one is very simple. If you want to use a copyrighted work, you ask permission, and then you pay for it. Anything else is theft, and anyone arguing for anything else is harming the UK creative industry." Monday's AI action plan, written by venture capitalist Matt Clifford called for: "reform the UK text and data mining regime so that it is at least as competitive as the EU ... The UK is falling behind." EU rules require copyright holders to opt out of the trawling process. This approach is opposed by many creatives who insist they should be automatically paid for use of their material. In its response to the action plan, the government said it will ensure "a competitive copyright regime that supports both our AI sector and the creative industries". Starmer said: "I am happy to endorse it and take the recommendations forward." Jo Twist, chief executive of the British Phonographic Industry which represents the recorded music trade, said: "AI's potential can be realised by growing both the creative and AI sectors, without resorting to destroying the UK's status as a creative superpower." She said it was not clear "why AI firms should be allowed to plunder the creative industries, taking music for their own profit without authorisation or compensation". The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has been contacted for comment. Mosse said that five of her novels, including Labyrinth "that I spent 15 years researching, planning, writing, rewriting, editing and publishing", have been "illegally scraped [to help train] large language models". She drew an analogy with a thief in a corner shop who steals all the Mars bars and when confronted by the shopkeeper says: "But you didn't tell me you didn't want me to steal your Mars bars." "That's essentially what the opt-out is," she said. "What is being proposed is that creators will have to spend their time hunting down AI companies to see if their work has been stolen. It will take time away from all of us doing the job that we do. It will mean that individuals are less likely to be able to make a living out of their craft. And consequently, everything will simply be diluted. It will be a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. We will have very little original work." The AI action plan recommendation comes despite a government consultation on how copyright should be handled still has six weeks to run. Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI executive now campaigning for AI firms to pay copyright fees, said: "It's clear that the government has made up its mind and will upend copyright law to favour AI companies, which throws the consultation into total disarray. If this goes ahead the government will be handing the life's work of this country's creators to AI companies, so they can outcompete those creatives."