Thanks for the immediate response to yesterday’s unusual cover and editorial.The impact on newsstands was striking, with every national newspaper printing an identical front page.
We urge Labour to abandon its plan to weaken the UK’s gold standard copyright laws – which are the foundation stone of this nation’s creative industries, worth £125bn a year to the economy.
A recap: ministers want to roll out the welcome mat to artificial intelligence firms and let them scrape others’ quality content without payment or permission. This is unlawful and would jeopardise the future of our creative sector, which employs 2.4 million people across music, film, TV, books, drama, audio, the visual arts and journalism.
As the editor of this newspaper, I know that quality journalism would pay a heavy price.
Plenty of people who work in the UK’s creative industries are pro-AI. There’s no desire to rewind the clock. The revolution is global. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be built on stealing others’ content.
What incentive is there to create high-quality content if a Silicon Valley giant can loot your work and regurgitate it as their own?
Yesterday brought rapid developments. The backlash is growing – and the political battle is now under way in Westminster.
Newspapers as varied as The i Paper, Financial Times, Guardian, Yorkshire Post, Scotsman, Daily Star and The Tenby Observer spoke as one. Public figures from the arts backed the campaign.
Big hitters from across the arts – including (clockwise from top left) Ed Sheeran, Dua Lipa, Sir Michael Morpurgo and Sir Paul McCartney – have renounced government plans that would give tech firms free reign to train artificial intelligence on their work for free.
Thirty-five artists – including Kate Bush, Helen Fielding and Sting – wrote to The Times yesterday warning that the plans “represent a wholesale giveaway of rights and income”.
They wrote: “The proposal is wholly unnecessary and counterproductive, jeopardising not only the country’s international position as a beacon of creativity but also the resulting jobs, economic contribution and soft power.”
The plans, they argue, threaten a £126bn industry that employs 2.4 million people in the UK.
Overnight the list of objectors grew to include Kate Bush, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Paul McCartney, Stephen Fry, Kazuo Ishiguro, Barbara Broccoli, Tom Stoppard, Simon Rattle, Elton John, Sting, Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa.
As I noted yesterday – cheeringly, there’s something you can do to help. MPs will soon debate the plan. Some Labour backbenchers are getting jittery as they feel the heat from constituents.
If you are concerned by the fallout from the Government weakening UK copyright laws, and you have just 30 seconds, you can write to your MP at this link: creativerightsinai.eaction.org.uk/MP.
Thanks and good luck everyone.
The term is used for artificial intelligence software capable of creating new content – from written answers to music to moving images – based on users’ prompts and questions. These tools, which include so-called large language models, have to be “trained” on vast quantities of human-created data to be able to return plausible and – mostly – accurate answers.
As part of its blueprint to put Britain at the forefront of developing AI technologies, the Government has proposed modifying copyright laws to allow developers to use all and any British-created material unless the owners of that content specifically “opt-out” from its use for that purpose.
The newly-formed Creative Rights in AI Coalition argues that the proposals will make it easier for tech giants to trawl British creative content – from newspaper archives to music catalogues – without payment or permission. There is concern that a key digital revenue stream will be choked off, threatening jobs.
The Make It Fair campaign launched today is asking for copyright laws to be maintained as they currently exist, allowing creators to license their content to AI companies in return for a fee. They argue that such a system would create a mutually beneficial relationship between tech companies and the creative sector.
Cahal Milmo
Comments
Leave a Comment