Creative Industries Protest Against UK AI and Copyright Plan

The government proposed a new copyright exemption for AI companies in mid-December. The consultation on the proposal caused waves of concern across the country’s creative industries, which account for over 5% of the British economy.

The sector’s campaign against the exemption went into overdrive ahead of the consultation’s closure. All of the UK’s major newspapers carried identical covers protesting against the change, while musicians such as Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, and Annie Lennox released an album featuring recordings of empty music studios and performance spaces, titled Is This What We Want?

Fortune reported that following this, Parliament’s culture and technology committees released a joint recommendation to the Labour government, urging it not to introduce the exemption at this point.

“The groundswell of concern from across the creative industries to the government’s proposals illustrates the scale of the threat artists face from artificial intelligence pilfering the fruits of their hard-earned success without permission,” Caroline Dinenage, Chair of the Culture Committee, said.

“The government should not introduce an ‘opt-out’ approach to the use of creative works for AI training, where all works are fair game unless creators say so, given that the technical measures to enforce these opt-outs do not yet exist,” she said.

Dinenage also called for “much tougher requirements on transparency of the data being used to train AI models, so creators will know without ambiguity where they need to be remunerated for the use of their works.”

A government-commissioned AI Opportunities Action Plan suggested that “copyright cleared” government-owned datasets be made available for AI training.

The parliamentary technology and culture committee chairs noted in a letter to the government that they had invited Google and OpenAI to appear at an evidence-gathering session, but the companies refused on the basis that the consultation was still ongoing.

“We chose not to press them, in part because we wanted to focus on arranging a productive session, and in part because the position of leading developers on the issue of copyright is clear,” they wrote. “Nonetheless, it is disappointing that they chose to decline our invitation. This stance is all too familiar to our committees, which share an interest in furthering the public’s understanding of how global companies develop, operate, and deploy their products, taking decisions that affect us all.”