The creative industries are fighting back against UK government proposals to let artificial intelligence companies use copyright-protected work without permission.
The latest protest is a silent album co-written by more than 1,000 musicians, including Kate Bush, and follows a statement signed by 48,000 creatives including Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus in which they warned of a “major, unjust threat” to artists’ livelihoods.
Why has copyright-protected work become a battleground in AI?
Generative AI models, the term for technology that underpins powerful tools like the ChatGPT chatbot, have to be trained on a vast amount of data in order to generate their responses. The main source of this information is on the open web, which contains a vast array of data from the contents of Wikipedia to newspaper articles and online book archives.
Creative professionals and industries including authors, artists and newspaper publishers are demanding compensation for the use of their work to build those models – and for the practice to stop until they have granted permission. They also argue that their work is being taken off them for free in order to build AI tools that create works in direct competition with their own.
What are the UK government proposals?
The government’s preferred option in a consultation is to allow AI companies to train the models on copyrighted work by giving them an exception for “text and data mining”. However, under the proposals creatives would be able to opt out of the mining process through what ministers are calling a “rights reservation” system. The opt-out proposal has met with scepticism from opponents of the government consultation, who say there is no evidence of a “water-tight” rights reservation process in any country.
The government says that AI firms like OpenAI already allow news publishers to block web crawlers from accessing their content.
The consultation also proposes measures that require transparency from AI developers on what content they have used to train their models.
The proposals are similar to those in the EU AI Act, which also includes an opt-out option. However, the act’s provisions have come in for criticism from an architect of EU copyright law.
What do the creative industries say about the proposals?
Critics of the consultation, such as Beeban Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords and a film-maker, say that copyright law does not need changing because it already does what it sets out to do: to stop someone’s work being used without permission.
They also argue that the opt-out option is unfair because it puts a burden on artists who might not realise such a provision exists and could also be difficult to implement for emerging artists. They also claim it is unworkable because keeping track of the distribution of their content across the internet is impossible.
According to the government, creative industries are worth £126bn to the UK economy and employ 2.4 million people.
What do tech firms say?
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has admitted that it would be “impossible” to train AI models without using copyrighted material. AI companies’ defence of using copyrighted material leans on the US legal doctrine of “fair use”, which allows use of content in certain circumstances without seeking the owner’s permission.
TechUK, a trade body representing tech firms, says current “uncertainty” over AI and copyright law is holding back development and use of the technology – including in the creative industries. The UK government also argues that copyright law is now “not tenable”, a situation reflected by a proliferation of legal disputes over the issue.
