Across the tabloids this morning is a story of creative industries fighting back against UK government proposals to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission. In protest more than 1,000 musicians - including Annie Lennox and Kate Bush - released a silent album, they say that the UK government's planned changes to copyright law would make it easier for AI companies to train models using copyrighted work without a licence.
The government’s proposal is to allow AI companies to train models on copyrighted work by giving them an exception for “text and data mining”. However, under the proposals creatives would be able to ‘opt out’ of the mining process through what ministers are calling a “rights reservation” system. The opt-out proposal has met with scepticism from opponents who say there is no evidence of a “water-tight” rights reservation process in any country.
I completely understand the fear that people have for their livelihoods, creative industries after all have already faced numerous pressures from the growing use of streaming platforms like Spotify (which pay a pittance) over purchasing CD’s, to the rising costs of touring, and the fallout from the pandemic on many event venues shutting their doors. But in many ways, this is a fight that just cannot be won, trying to slow the inexorable progress of AI seems too little and too late.
We are after all training artificial systems to think and act like humans, such systems will learn, make mistakes, copy, and create new types of content. This is really no different to the human creative process, songs are often variations on those before them, most use the same chords in slightly different sequences, and movies are often a re-imagining of fairy tales from hundreds of years ago.
What this boils down to really is who benefits financially, creative AI systems or creative humans? Can it be both, and what does this mean for the future of the creative and media industries?
TechMarketView subscribers can explore these issues further in the remainder of this UKHotViewsExtra article - available here: ‘What is the future of creative content?
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Posted by Simon Baxter at '10:31'
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