Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said she sympathized with artists’ calls for their copyrighted works not to be scraped for free by AI companies and said she wanted to “reset” the debate.
In remarks that signaled a change in approach from her predecessor, Peter Kyle, who wanted to require artists to proactively opt out of having their work ingested by generative AI systems, she said that “people rightly want to be paid for their work” and that “in the future we have to find ways for both sectors to grow and thrive.”
The government is consulting on a new intellectual property framework for AI. The most popular large-scale language models (LLMs) require vast amounts of training data to work effectively.
The issue sparked passionate protests from some of Britain’s most famous artists. This month, Paul McCartney released a 2 minute 45 second silent track of an empty studio on an album protesting copyright theft by AI companies, as part of a campaign also supported by Kate Bush, Sam Fender, Pet Shop Boys and Hans Zimmer.
Meanwhile, Elton John called the British government an “absolute loser” over proposals to let tech companies use copyrighted works without permission, and called Kyle “a bit of an idiot”.
Ms Kendall, who replaced Kyle in September, said she and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy were “currently resetting this discussion. We are talking about the creative sector and the AI sector together.”
Campaigners for the right for artists, musicians and writers to have their copyrighted works not used as training data for large-scale AI models had raised concerns when Mr Kendall appointed a special adviser in September who previously said: “Whether or not we believe philosophically that large AI companies should compensate content creators, in practice they are never legally required to do so.”
But Mr Kendall said: “The views I had before I started working for the government are not the views of the government. We will find an agreement that will help us move forward together.”
He also said he recognizes that many departments in the creative sector want transparency about whether their work is being used to train AI systems, which he said will be an important part of getting paid.
Following a $1.5bn (£1.15bn) legal settlement by Anthropic, one of the world’s largest AI companies, a searchable database of around 500,000 books used to train its models was made public last month. This allowed authors to see if their work was infected and claim a payout of approximately $3,000.
Bevan Kidron, a film director who has fought in parliament to protect the rights of creators, welcomed Kendall for making it clear that he “recognizes the need for creators to protect their property and livelihoods.”
But Lady Kidron said the government had “lost the trust of the entire creative community and the public, who overwhelmingly support the need for creative industries to receive a fair day’s wage for their work”.
An initial report on the government’s plans is expected to be published by the end of the year, followed by a fuller report by March 2026.
Mr Kidron called on governments to act now to avoid awarding public sector contracts to AI companies that are in dispute with copyright holders, and called on AI companies to be transparent about the work they have trained their systems on and to “commit to respecting copyright.”
Kendall said: “I can see why… There’s so much going on already that many creators are urging us to act now.
“But we have to get this right… There are a lot of details to work through here, but we don’t want to be forced to choose, and we believe it’s possible to find a way forward that is beneficial to both of us.”
