The UK Government’s consultation on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and copyright laws concluded on 25 February and ultimately failed to address concerns raised by those in creative industries about the impact of AI on their work.
With AI becoming increasingly normalised in our everyday lives, laws and regulations have been unable to keep up. Remembering being at school and college free of Chat-GPT seems like a different world compared to the presence of AI at university now.
With all this happening so fast, it’s shocking how little we actually know about AI, and the longer-term impact it’s having in creative industries. The government’s consultation tried to mitigate this conflict but has made little progress in doing so.
Copyright laws in the UK help creatives, academics, and individuals control what their work is used for. As well as intellectual ownership, copyright ensures that people receive payment for their work.
The consultation opened to gather public and professional opinion on proposed changes to copyright law to accommodate the development of AI models. Currently, these models are developed using huge amounts of publicly available data, which also includes material protected by copyright.
The UK government has argued that current copyright laws should be relaxed to accelerate the development of AI; by changing copyright to an “opt-out” system if individuals do not want their work to be used for training Artificial Intelligence.
In reality, individuals have very little control over what their work is used for online, and a further relaxation of property rights would only make it harder for creatives to hold companies accountable for intellectual theft. This would also mean that creators have to spend their own time “opting-out” of these systems, placing the burden of responsibility on individuals rather than corporations.
Several organisations and individuals have criticised this proposed change in the law, including authors, musicians, academics, and artists. Richard Osman, Kate Mosse, Paul McCartney, Kate Bush, and Stephen Fry are among those concerned about the theft of their creative work by AI companies.
Starmer’s government is prioritising economic growth and the “Plan for Change” at the expense of creative freedom and ownership. The government’s desire to turn the UK into a world leader in Artificial Intelligence will inevitably come at a cost to the arts, and increase the instability of people working in fields that are already struggling to survive
The fact that AI works using such large amounts of data perfectly sums up this issue. Nothing that these algorithms and machines produce is original, yet everything used for their training has been written, made, or created by humans. Protecting the intellectual rights of people has never been more important, and we should all be concerned that Starmer’s proposed reforms to copyright law pose such a risk to those working in creative industries.
“Artificial Intelligence & AI & Machine Learning” by mikemacmarketing is licensed under CC BY 2.0.