As AI Advances, U.K. Government Plans Study to “Unlock Full Potential” for Creatives
The U.K. government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Tuesday launched a consultation on “plans to give certainty to the creative industries and AI developers on how copyright material can be used to train AI models.” The consultation will run for 10 weeks, closing on Feb. 25, with the goal of helping to “drive growth across both sectors by ensuring protection and payment for rights holders and supporting AI developers to innovate responsibly.”
The governing Labour Party has described both the creative and AI sectors as “central to the government’s Industrial Strategy, and these proposals aim to forge a new path forward which will allow both to flourish and drive growth.”
Key areas of the consultation include “boosting trust and transparency between the sectors, so rights holders have a better understanding of how AI developers are using their material and how it has been obtained.” It also explores “how creators can license and be remunerated for the use of their material, and how wide access to high-quality data for AI developers can be strengthened to enable innovation across the U.K. AI sector,” the government said.
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It argued that its proposals “will help unlock the full potential of the AI sector and creative industries to drive innovation, investment, and prosperity across the country, driving forward the U.K. government’s mission to deliver the highest sustained growth in the G7.”
And it highlighted that a “combined approach” is “designed to strengthen trust between the two sectors, which are increasingly interlinked, clearing the way for developers to confidently build and deploy the next generation of AI applications in the U.K., in a way that ensures human creators and rights holders have a shared stake in AI’s transformative potential.”
Currently, uncertainty about how copyright law applies to AI is holding back both sectors from reaching their full potential, the still-new Starmer government has said. After previous attempts to agree on a voluntary AI copyright code of practice proved unsuccessful, it emphasized on Tuesday that it “is determined to take proactive steps with our creative and AI sectors to deliver a workable solution.”
The consultation proposes the introduction of an exception to copyright law for AI training for commercial purposes while allowing rights holders to reserve their rights, so they can control the use of their content. Together with transparency requirements, the goal is to give them more certainty and control over how their content is used and support them in reaching licensing deals. In turn, AI developers could get greater certainty about what material they can and cannot use.
The consultation also proposes new requirements for AI model developers to be more transparent about their model training datasets and how they are obtained. For example, AI developers could be required to provide more information about what content they have used to train their models. The goal is to help rights holders better understand when and how their content has been used in training AI.
Plus, it looks to address issues “related to the protection of personality rights in the context of digital replicas, such as deepfake imitations of individuals,” and will review whether the current legal frameworks are sufficient to tackle these issues.
“This government firmly believes that our musicians, writers, artists and other creatives should have the ability to know and control how their content is used by AI firms and be able to seek licensing deals and fair payment,” said U.K. Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Lisa Nandy. “Achieving this, and ensuring legal certainty, will help our creative and AI sectors grow and innovate together in partnership.”
Working with the creative and media industries and the AI sector will allow the government to “develop this clearer copyright system for the digital age and ensure that any system is workable and easy-to-use for businesses of all sizes,” she concluded.
Nandy recently also unveiled plans to broaden the scope of U.K. media merger laws, updating them “for the digital age to reflect modern news consumption habits and better protect media freedom and plurality.” The current regulatory regime only covers television, radio and print publications.
“The U.K. has an incredibly rich and diverse cultural sector and a groundbreaking tech sector which is pushing the boundaries of AI,” added Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle on Tuesday. “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.”
He concluded: “This is all about partnership: balancing strong protections for creators while removing barriers to AI innovation; and working together across government and industry sectors to deliver this.”
Jo Twist, the CEO of the BPI, the country’s recorded music industry association, said the organization was looking forward to “engaging with the detail of the government’s proposals and welcome elements to improve transparency, record-keeping and the objective of developing licensing models, but it remains our firm view that an exception to copyright law for AI training with rights reservation would be hugely damaging to our national interest.”
She continued: “The music industry has long embraced the opportunity of AI and supports a strong market for licensing. However, we remain to be convinced that a copyright exception would move the AI and creative industries closer to agreeing (on) a functioning licensing model; in fact, we believe it would further disincentivize tech companies from doing so.”
Twist also highlighted: “Other markets have shown that opt-out schemes introduce more legal uncertainty, are unworkable in practice, and are woefully ineffective in protecting creative work from misuse and theft.”
She concluded: “Strong copyright is the basis of growth. It enables creative and AI sectors to flourish. A copyright exception would weaken the U.K.’s copyright system and offer AI companies permission to take – for their own profit, and without authorization or compensation – the product of U.K. musicians’ hard work, expertise, and investment. It would amount to a wholly unnecessary subsidy, worth billions of pounds, to overseas tech corporations at the expense of homegrown creators.”
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