AI is stealing from Britain's creative industries

And Labour seems to believe that crime should be legal

- Dylan Jones

Don’t look over your shoulder, but the Government is selling the creative industries down the river. On December 17, Sir 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 its 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, said: “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.

Looking the other way