Don’t look over your shoulder, but the government is selling the creative industries down the river. On December 17th, in the run-up to Christmas, when most people were busy celebrating, Keir Starmer stuck two fat fingers up at every artist, musician, writer and performer trying to earn a crust from their trade. That day, the government launched a consultation which outlined their preferred route regarding text and data mining, allowing AI companies to train on copyright material unless rights are expressly reserved (by machine readable format) despite the fact that there is no workable method of doing that. The Government is planning to allow big tech firms to ignore traditional copyright rules when training their AI systems.
Peter Kyle, the decidedly substandard Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, says: “The UK has an incredibly rich and diverse cultural sector and a groundbreaking tech sector which is pushing the boundaries of AI. It’s clear that our current AI and copyright framework does not support either our creative industries or our AI sectors to compete on the global stage.”
This is blatantly untrue. Copyright is precisely what supports the UK’s creative industries’ ability to compete on the global stage. There is no problem with the copyright framework. The issue here is the wholesale theft of copyright by the AI fraternity who have scraped the internet for every piece of human creativity past and present without permission or payment. The even bigger issue is that the government apparently believes that the solution to this mass theft is to make this crime legal.
Unsurprisingly, the creative industries are furious. Stephen Spielberg is terrified of AI and isn’t afraid to say so.
He believes that human existence is necessary to art, and according to the legendary director, “The human soul is unimaginable and ineffable. It cannot be created by any algorithm. This is something that exists only in us. If we were to lose that because books, films, music tracks are being created by the machines we have made... Are we going to let all of this happen? It terrifies me.”
If the government goes ahead with this, they risk selling down the river the UK’s creative industries
Spielberg is not alone, and recently the chorus of disapproval over machine-driven creatures has included everyone from Ed Sheeran and Lil Wayne to Bad Bunny and John Legend. Even Stephen Fry has got involved, after he found out his voice had been fraudulently used to narrate a documentary. The actor exclaimed, “I said not one word of that, it was a machine... It could have made me read anything, from a call to storm Parliament to hard porn, all without my knowledge and without my permission.”
The problem is, our government seem to be looking the other way. They seem to be under the misguided impression that they need to chip away at copyright in order to “balance” the interests of creative industries and tech/AI. They appear to believe that copyright is a barrier to innovation, whereas obviously the opposite is true. If the government get their way, then AI companies will be given more leeway to train their systems on copyright material without prior consent or payment. So instead of needing prior permission/payment, AI companies would be able to go ahead and use creative work for AI training unless the creator/rightsholder has expressly opted out.
Which is obviously a very bad thing indeed, and tantamount to artistic vandalism.
As Baroness Beeban Kidron, director of Bridget Jones The Edge of Reason, put it: “Should shopkeepers have to opt out of shoplifters? Should victims of violence have to opt out of attacks? Should those who use the internet for banking have to opt out of fraud? I struggle to think of another situation where someone protected by law must proactively wrap it around themselves on an individual basis.”
If the government goes ahead with this, they risk selling down the river the UK’s creative industries (worth £124 billion) for the sake of a nascent AI sector that simply needs to play by the rules that everyone else does and ask for permission and pay if they want to use other people’s creative work. Yet again, Keir Starmer’s government appear to have grabbed the wrong end of the PowerPoint clicker where business is concerned.
Copyright serves to safeguard the value of human creativity, while also driving value in the wider music and creative industries. If the UK is to remain a global creative powerhouse in an increasingly competitive world, the Government must ensure that it is respected and enforced.
This is not a luddite agenda. As ever, the creative industries are at the vanguard of experimenting with the new possibilities AI presents. They are as excited as anyone about AI’s potential to solve world problems from cancer to climate change. They just don’t quite see why that involves ingesting the entire history of music, literature and movies without permission.
“While the British music industry is already embracing AI's many positive use-cases, it is also our firm view that a broad copyright exception for text and data mining by AI firms would be hugely damaging to the UK’s creative industries,” says Sophie Jones, the BPI’s Chief Strategy Officer.
What we don’t need is the kind of slavish devotion and tech exceptionalism espoused by the likes of Peter Kyle
Starmer’s government look as though they are bending over backwards to appease the tech companies, at the expense of the powerhouses who continue to fuel the UK’s creative industries. Peter Kyle thinks that global technology companies are now so powerful that countries such as Britain must treat them in the same way they would treat a nation state. In a worrying admission he said governments needed to show a “sense of humility” and use “statecraft” when dealing with companies such as Meta, Google, and Microsoft instead of threatening new laws to influence developments in areas such as frontier artificial intelligence.
Which is tantamount to allowing them to do what the hell they want.
As I pointed out at the time, there was almost no mention of the creative industries in Labour’s pre-election manifesto, and they still seem unable to grasp its wider importance to the UK economy. How sad that the government don’t grasp the importance and influence of an industry that involves music, film, art, design, theatre, journalism, and the ideation of creative spirit.
At the risk of alienating tech partners, the government needs to show some global leadership in standing behind copyright as the foundation for the success of our creative sector and make it abundantly clear that tech companies need to abide by it just like everyone else.
What we don’t need is the kind of slavish devotion and tech exceptionalism espoused by the likes of Peter Kyle.
If you don’t believe me, go ask Stephen Spielberg.
Dylan Jones is editor-at-large of the Standard
