Minister indicates sympathy for artists in debate over AI and copyright | Regulators
Technology secretary Liz Kendall said she was sympathetic to artists’ demands that their copyrighted works not be scraped by AI companies without payment, and said she wanted to “reset” the debate.
In comments suggesting a change in approach from his predecessor Peter Kyle, who had hoped artists would actively refuse to have their work picked up by generative AI systems, he said “people rightly want to get paid for the work they do” and “we need to find a way for both industries to be able to grow and thrive in the future”.
The government is consulting on a new intellectual property framework for artificial intelligence, which in the case of the most common large language models (LLMs) requires large 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 two-minute, 45-second silent track of an empty studio on an album protesting copyright seizures by AI firms, as part of a campaign also supported by Kate Bush, Sam Fender, Pet Shop Boys and Hans Zimmer.
Meanwhile, Elton John called the UK government “absolute losers” over the proposal to allow tech firms to use copyrighted works without permission and described Kyle as “a bit of an idiot”.
Kendall, who replaced Kyle in September, said he and culture secretary Lisa Nandy were “now resetting that debate. We are talking to the creative sector and the AI sector together.”
Campaigners against copyrighted works by artists, musicians and writers being used as training data for large AI models voiced their fears when Kendall appointed a special adviser in September. The consultant had previously said that “whether or not you philosophically believe that large AI firms should compensate content creators, in practice they will never be legally required to do so.”
But Kendall said: “The views I had before I came to work for the government are not the views of the government. Together we will find an agreement that will help us move forward.”
He also said he was aware that many parts of the creative industry wanted transparency about whether their work was being used to train AI systems, and that this would be a key part of getting them paid.
A searchable database of nearly 500,000 books used to train its models was published last month, following a $1.5bn (£1.15bn) legal settlement from Anthropic, one of the world’s largest AI companies, so authors could find out if their work was infected and claim payments of around $3,000.
Beeban Kidron, a film director and diverse candidate who has been fighting in parliament to protect creators’ rights, welcomed Kendall, “making it clear that she recognizes the need to protect creators’ property and livelihoods.”
But Lady Kidron said the government had “lost the trust of the entire creative community and public, who overwhelmingly support the need for the creative industry to be fairly paid for their work”.
The first report on the government’s plans is expected to be published before the end of the year, followed by a more comprehensive report by March 2026.
Kidron called on the government to take action by not signing public sector agreements with AI companies that are now in conflict with copyright holders; He demanded that AI companies be transparent about what jobs they train their systems on and “commit to respecting copyrights.”
Kendall said: “I understand why… many creators are urging us to act now because so much has already happened.
“But we need to get this right… there are a lot of details to figure out here, but I believe it’s possible to find a way to provide both because we don’t want to have to choose.”
