Paul Mccartney, Elton John, Other Creatives Demand Ai Comes Clean On Scraping

More than 400 of the UK’s leading media and arts professionals have written to the prime minister to back an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill, which promises to offer the nation’s creative industries transparency over copyrighted works ingested by AI models.

Signatories include some of the UK’s best-known artists such as musicians Paul McCartney, Elton John, Coldplay, writer/director Richard Curtis, artist Antony Gormley, and actor Ian McKellen.

The UK government proposes to allow exceptions to copyright rules in the case of text and data mining needed for AI training, with an opt-out option for content producers.

“Government amendments requiring an economic impact assessment and reports on the feasibility of an ‘opt-out’ copyright regime and transparency requirements do not meet the moment, but simply leave creators open to years of copyright theft,” the letter says.

The group – which also includes Kate Bush, Robbie Williams, Tom Stoppard, and Russell T Davies – said the amendments tabled for the Lords debate would create a requirement for AI firms to tell copyright owners which individual works they have ingested.

“Copyright law is not broken, but you can’t enforce the law if you can’t see the crime taking place. Transparency requirements would make the risk of infringement too great for AI firms to continue to break the law,” the letter states.

Baroness Kidron, who proposed the amendment, said: “How AI is developed and who it benefits are two of the most important questions of our time. The UK creative industries reflect our national stories, drive tourism, create wealth for the nation, and provide 2.4 million jobs across our four nations. They must not be sacrificed to the interests of a handful of US tech companies.”

The letter was also signed by a number of media organizations, including the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, and the National Union of Journalists. Baroness Kidron added: “The UK is in a unique position to take its place as a global player in the international AI supply chain, but to grasp that opportunity requires the transparency provided for in my amendments, which are essential to create a vibrant licensing market.”

Labour peer Lord Brennan of Canton backed the amendment. “We cannot let mass copyright theft inflict damage on our economy for years to come,” he said. “Transparency over AI inputs will unlock tremendous economic growth, positioning the UK as the premier market for the burgeoning trade in high-quality AI training data.”

Debate rages as to whether AI training should disregard copyright. For example, The Atlantic alleges that Meta, along with other GenAI devs, may have accessed millions of copyrighted books and research papers through the LibGen dataset. Researchers have speculated that OpenAI may have done the same, with the allegations a part of lawsuits over the alleged use of copyrighted material. UK authors were alarmed to find their copyrighted books in the database.

Meanwhile, the head of the US Copyright Office has reportedly been fired, a day after the agency concluded that AI models’ use of copyrighted material went beyond existing doctrines of fair use. ®

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