“No one should have to opt-out of being robbed,” says author Jeanette Winterson, in anger at Government plans to allow artificial intelligence companies to train their large language models on creators’ works for free.
Creative types, from television presenter Richard Osman to Sir Paul McCartney, are also upset. A collective of 1,000 musicians has made a protest album featuring the ghostly sound of empty recording studios, hinting at the fate of one of our most distinctive export sectors.
How could Sir Keir Starmer’s administration have fallen out so badly with the creative industries? Labour was once the party that used to invite Noel Gallagher, Eddie Izzard and Lenny Henry to parties at No 10. Arts titans Cameron Mackintosh and Jeremy Irons were prominent party donors and the author Ken Follett led a tribe of cheerleading “Labour Luvvies”.
But in its desperation to embrace the AI revolution, the Government has enraged creatives who believe the technology is being used to steal their work and livelihoods. Labour has identified AI as a much-needed lever for growth and ministers hope to establish the UK as an international AI hub, overseen by light-touch regulation.
But in doing so, they risk hurting the golden goose of the UK’s creative sectors, which generate more than 125bn a year for the economy and support 2.4 million jobs.
The heart of the issue is the need for tech companies to have access to vast amounts of online data to train their insatiable generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT. The Government is exploring a controversial exemption to UK copyright law that would allow tech companies to scrape images, film, music and text from online sources for free, unless the original creators have explicitly opted out of that process.
Such an arrangement would delight big tech companies which, despite being fiercely protective of the copyright of their own products, seem to think they should be allowed complete freedom to train AI’s large language models (LLMs) without having to pay content owners.
If big tech were able to scrape UK online material under a new text or data mining (TDM) exemption, the onus would be on creators to police whether their material has been used unlawfully. Such a system has already been deployed in the European Union, where creators have found it all but impossible to detect whether tech firms had complied with their wishes to opt out or not.
The previous Conservative government, also sensing an AI gold rush, wanted to go down a similar path only a year ago. It dropped its plans after a backlash from the arts and media sectors and a highly critical report by the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, titled At Risk: Our Creative Future.
Shortly after last summer’s election, and following lobbying on behalf of Silicon Valley, the creative industries discovered to its chagrin that the TDM exemption was back on the agenda. Science minister Lord Vallance and the UK’s AI tsar Matt Clifford are among government champions of positioning the UK as a leader in AI.
In December, the Government opened a public consultation, ostensibly to resolve a standoff between AI developers and the creative sectors. But Dan Guthrie, director general of the Alliance for Intellectual Property, argues that there is “no market failure” in UK copyright law and it simply needs to be upheld. If the UK strengthens its already fine reputation as a global creative hub, then AI will inevitably thrive alongside that content, many creatives argue.
Big tech surely has the means to know what material it has trained its models on – and the capability to pay for it. Significantly, Microsoft has done deals with the Financial Times, Reuters and other content producers for training its CoPilot AI model. OpenAI has partnered with publisher Condé Nast and signed a deal with Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. But elsewhere, large troves of content, some produced by lone freelancers, are being scraped by big tech for free.
In exasperation, the UK’s news brands have come together today to launch the “Make It Fair” campaign, and demand that content is scraped only with permission and payment.
Labour must decide whether it bends the knee to big tech. And that includes Elon Musk, who is developing his AI chatbot Grok3, while simultaneously denouncing Starmer’s Britain a land where free speech is dead.
That is of course untrue. But, warns the Creators’ Rights Alliance, which represents 500,000 creators, “we are in danger of falling into a world of mimicry”. If copyright law is weakened, we could end up in such a dystopia.
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