The UK government is holding an open consultation on copyright and AI. This might seem an esoteric bit of government faffing that most people don't need to pay attention to, but it's far more than that. It's potentially a fight to the death between British creative industries and the techbros who are currently tearing the US state machinery apart in defiance of US law and the constitution. Do they look like people we can trust?
This is the issue: creative work is protected by copyright laws. This makes it illegal for one person to copy the work of another without their permission and distribute it or make a profit from selling or licensing it. The livelihood of the creative industries and individual creators relies on this. You can't steal creative work in the same way that you can't steal beans from the supermarket. It's simple. But the AI bros say they want an exception so that they can 'scrape' high quality creative works to train their AIs. And for some utterly bizarre reason, the government is up for this. The creative industries are worth £126 billion and employ 2.4 million people in the UK. Latest UK government figures show AI generated only £14 billion and employed 64,500 people. But the government sees potential for growth (even at the cost of die-back in the creative industries).
The argument the AI bros make is that they are not really copying anything. They are scraping the works and generating new works from patterns they have identified in them. Yet if you tried to publish a 'new' Harry Potter story, you would find Bloomsbury and Warner Bros suing you within seconds. If you copied all Disney's 101 Dalmatians and made a new cartoon in which they did something else, you would be sued. So where's the difference? If AI has been trained on, say, the works of an illustrator, someone can ask it to produce a particular image in the style of that illustrator and then they don't have to pay the illustrator, even though the new image would not exist if it were not for their years of training and practising and developing their style.
The government and the AI bros are trying to get away with this by ignoring the distinction between generative AI (like ChatGPT or, more recently DeepSeek) and the more useful (for humankind) AI that will help develop new medications, identify cancer cells, decode degraded documents, and so on. Yes, we can benefit from AI's input in many fields. No, we don't need AI writing poor quality stories, or copying the artwork or musical styles of talented professionals. AI needs to be trained to recognise cancerous cells by looking at cancerous and non-cancerous cells, not by scanning images by illustrators or literary novels. It works out new protein structures by looking at the molecular configuration of known proteins, not by listening to all the work of Mick Jagger or scanning photos from a picture library. The point of training AI on high quality creative work is ONLY to replace those creators and their livelihoods. ChatGPT can already write coherent sentences, so if someone wants to use it to write their in-house reports, marketing documents, etc, it can do that now. It won't be improved by having scanned the latest prize-winning novel.
Here's a suggestion. The government could licence for AI scraping any text written at the expense of the tax-payer. So any government documents, anything published by people who are paid for their work in the civil service, research papers from research funded by the state, and so on. And they can leave the rest of us alone. If a particular organisation wants to use AI to write their reports or whatever, they can get an LLM and train it on all their previous in-house work — that is, the text they own.
As for those people who would like to write a novel but don't have the skill — just don't. There are lots of people who would like to be professional footballers but don't have the skill. They can't do it. That's life.
And finally... While this consultation has been ongoing, DeepSeek has stolen OpenAI's work to make its own cheaper and better model. Those of us whose work has been stolen think this is pretty hilarious. It also means the UK consultation is probably a complete waste of time as the baton has already passed to China and no one is going to invest confidently in UK-based AI anyway. But please, if you want actual writers and illustrators to survive, tell the government we don't want the AI bros to have access to our work. And make sure you don't buy or endorse materials based on IPR theft.
If you want to respond to the government consultation, you can write to your MP or respond individually. The consultation document is here. It includes specific question you can respond to. It's long. Of course. To discourage you. Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Anne Rooney
Coming later this year: The Essential Book of AI, Arcturus Publishing, November 2025
1 comment:
Bloody well said, Anne.
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