Culture secretary and Wigan MP Lisa Nandy has conceded that the government “got it wrong” in its initial approach to AI and copyright for the creative industries.
“I just want to be really clear about where this government sits on it, because we went out to try and find a way to help tech and creative industries to unlock the opportunities of AI, and we got it wrong in the first instance,” Nandy has told Peaky Blinders screenwriter Steven Knight at a SXSW London session on AI.
In March of this year, the UK government changed its position on copyright and AI, saying it did not plan to introduce an “opt-out” exception to copyright for AI training. The proposed “opt-out model would have meant that rights holders and content creators would have to specifically state that they did not want their work “scraped” to train AI models, allowing big tech unfettered access to their work online without consent.
“We’ve held our hands up and said ’we got it wrong’. You don’t hear that in politics a lot,” she continued. “We’ve reset and restarted that process. Liz Kendall, who is the science secretary, and I are absolutely crystal clear that one of the greatest USPs that this country has is our creative industries.
“There are opportunities, but there are challenges, and there are particularly challenges for the smaller players who don’t have protection against their work being used in ways that don’t support them to make a living, or in ways that could be harmful.”
The government had faced an immense backlash from the creative industries, with 88% of 11,500 respondents to a government consultation saying they wanted to see copyright licenses required for all cases when training AI models on previously existing works.
Nandy added that the government was liaising with representatives from both the tech world and the creative industries to find a solution to the apparent impasses, bud admitted: “I won’t sit here and pretend we have resolved it, because we haven’t.”
She continued: “When I talk to the tech companies, what I hear a lot from them is that when they started with AI, what they wanted was content. They wanted a lot of data very quickly to help develop the system. What they now want is quality, and when it comes to quality human content, because the UK is a nation of storytellers, when it comes to music, film, TV, fashion, we are second to none. The UK is a place where they want to do business, so if you get a framework right, this could be really good for the creative industries as well.”
Knight countered that he considered AI a threat to writers: “[Tech companies] seem to escape from any sort of moral judgement…But I think there is an absence of obligation from certain people to do the right thing by the rest of us,” he said.
