A House of Lords committee has warned that the UK must not allow “opaque” AI models to be trained on human jobs without restriction at the expense of the “powerhouse” creative sector.
Rose’s Communications and Digital Committee has been conducting research into AI, copyright and the creative industries since last year.
The commission said in its latest report published on Friday that the UK “faces a choice between two futures”. One is that the UK is a world leader in responsible, license-based AI development, and the other is that the UK “continues to drift towards large-scale unauthorized use of creative content and long-term reliance on opaque models trained overseas, with most of the benefits going to a small number of US-based companies, while the harm to UK creators increases.”
The commission named the creative sector as an “economic powerhouse” contributing billions to the UK economy and said it was underpinned by a “gold standard framework for copyright”.
The report said that in the age of generative AI, limited transparency from developers and no special protections for “digital-ness” pose serious risks to creators’ livelihoods.
“Meanwhile, stakeholders in the technology sector are calling for broad new exceptions to commercial text and data mining to be introduced in the UK that would legalize large-scale AI training on copyrighted works. Without this, they argue, the growth of the UK’s AI sector will be stunted.”
The committee therefore recommended that the UK remove the exemption for commercial data mining with an opt-out model, close gaps in the protection of digital replicas, require transparency in AI training, and prioritize the development and adoption of a US sovereign AI model.
