AI is about to pull off the heist of the century

Since Labour won a landslide in last summer’s UK General Election, critics have asked: is this government uniquely spiteful?

Evidence for the prosecution abounds. The introduction of inheritance tax on small farms ensures many will no longer belong to families. The imposition of VAT on private schools is turning out to cost more than it saves – but at least sticks it to the posh kids, which is presumably the point. Energy secretary Ed Miliband’s decision to concrete over two of Britain’s shale-gas wells has a medieval quality to it. As did the harsh punishments doled out by the courts for offensive memes and tweets after last year’s Southport disorders. But is anything more pointlessly spiteful than the UK government’s proposed changes to copyright?

These are being urged on the government by the giant technology companies who have invested in generative artificial intelligence. AI requires three inputs: computers, labour and training data. AI firms have to pay for the first two, but they think they can get the third for free. And Labour seems eager to help them.

To do so, the UK government envisages turning intellectual-property (IP) rights on their head. Copyright, as things stand, confers a pseudo property right to all creators, allowing them to veto certain uses of their creations or to claim royalties. This obliges anyone using copyrighted material to acquire a licence. Under Labour’s proposals, rightsholders would instead be forced to ‘opt out’ of having their works being used by AI. It’s the equivalent of being required to post a ‘Do Not Steal’ sign on your house if you want the theft to be considered a crime – and then having to do the police work yourself. No other country in the world has proposed such a radical step. (The last Conservative government briefly toyed with the idea, but backed down.)

Historically, new technologies that have allowed the storage and transmission of cultural works have led to the creation of new markets and new licensing regimes. These have, in the end, benefitted both the tech firms and copyright holders. There have been plenty of skirmishes between Silicon Valley and the creative industries over the years, but the effective abolition of copyright was never seriously on the table. Until now.

This current battle is different for two reasons. Firstly, because generative AI is different – it doesn’t merely reproduce a creative work on a new platform. It instead produces a derivative pastiche, or ‘slop’, based on original works. Secondly, because Big Tech now approaches IP as a zero-sum game. For AI to win, the tech firms argue, IP must be done away with. Astonishingly, Labour agrees with them.

The creative industries make a strong economic case as to why this is a bad idea. Copyright-intensive industries contribute to around five per cent of the UK’s annual goods exports – and we are one of only three net exporters of music in the world.

AI advocates claim that any restrictions on what data the models can train on will hold back technological progress or will hold Britain back in the global AI race. ‘AI for drug discovery, small-business automation or advanced manufacturing’ will be hindered, says the co-founder of one lobby group. ‘AI models won’t be built or adopted [in the UK] but they will continue to be trained abroad.’

But the argument that AI requires the collected works of Elton John and Martin Amis to make breakthroughs in protein-folding does not quite add up. As Financial Times policy chief Matt Rogerson points out, AlphaFold, an AI programme that can predict protein structures, ‘wasn’t built with the Beach Boys, or the contents of BBC iPlayer, it was made using the protein data bank’. ‘Songs do not help AI solve any problem other than how to make new songs without paying songwriters’, agrees Paul Sanders, founder of the State51 Music Group. ‘What other industry expects their raw material to be provided for free and by force, by the same people they are trying to compete with?’, asks Dominic Young, former digital boss at News Corp. Labour’s willingness to impose harm on a successful industry sector to give another a free lunch only adds to the impression that this is a spiteful government.

This week, there have been concerted publicity efforts to oppose the changes. These include synchronised campaigns across rival newspapers and a silent album by recording artists, including Kate Bush. Each ‘silence’ is different, with each having been recorded in a different space by a different artist – making it more original than anything generative AI has ever created.

Thousands have also responded to the UK government’s consultation on the copyright reforms, which closed this week, to oppose the move (almost no one supports it apart from Big Tech).

Even stronger than the economic case against shelving copyright are questions about personhood and the dignity of the creator. These are being routinely violated by AI’s pastiches. As I wrote on spiked last year, ‘ultimately, AI not only compromises the rights of creatives, it also violates their sense of self’. Many of those raging against Labour’s copyright landgrab on X are not major commercial artists, but individuals who have carved out a unique identity for themselves. (Just take a look at some of the choice responses to economist Sam Bowman when he complained that ‘copyright laws create huge transaction costs for AI labs to use IP-protected data’.)

Nevertheless, with Labour in its post-ideological phase, in which it has jettisoned everything it once believed in, facile arguments about enabling ‘AI-powered growth’ have found a receptive audience. Labour has become an empty vessel into which Big Tech can pour any fantasy it likes. The result will be the heist of intellectual property on an unprecedented scale.

Andrew Orlowski is a weekly columnist at the Telegraph. Visit his website here. Follow him on X: @AndrewOrlowski.