UK publishers urge Prime Minister to protect creators in future AI strategy
The Publishers Association pushes Sunak for IP protection in AI ahead of Bletchley Park summit | Science, Innovation and Technology Committee unveils key governance challenges facing the rollout of any new rules.
The UK Publishers Association has called upon the government to ensure that IP laws are upheld in the context of AI.
A letter addressed to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on behalf of the publishing industry emphasised the need to strike a balance between fostering AI innovation and protecting the interests of the UK's thriving content industries.
The plea, put forth by Dan Conway, CEO of the association, precedes an AI Safety Summit to establish guidelines and regulations for the responsible use of AI technologies, which will be held at Bletchley Park in November.
In his letter, published August 31, Conway requested that the government make “a strong statement either as part of, or in parallel with, the summit to make clear that UK IP law should be respected when any content is ingested by AI systems and a licence obtained in advance.”
“The training of AI systems should be done transparently, with the consent of, and in a manner that credits and fairly compensates the creator or IP rightsholder ie under licence.”
The Publishers Association, which represents a broad spectrum of publishers in the UK, outlined its readiness to embrace AI technologies that promise to bring “transparent, and ultimately ethical AI that benefits everyone across society.”
The publishing industry is worth £7 billion to the UK economy, employs 70,000 people, and supports hundreds of thousands of authors, Conway wrote.
However, the organisation is resolute that this embrace should not come at the expense of IP rights.
The association says the success of AI will be dependent on a framework that encourages investment in creative and academic output.
UK report identities key AI challenges
Last week also saw the UK Science, Innovation and Technology Committee (UKSITC) release a report on AI.
The UKSITC launched an inquiry in October 2022 to examine the impact of the technology on different areas of society and the economy; whether and how AI and its different uses should be regulated; and the UK government’s AI governance proposals.
The interim report highlighted a “growing imperative to ensure governance and regulatory frameworks are not left behind by the pace of technological innovation.”
And urged policymakers to take measures to safely harness the benefits of the tech and encourage future innovations.
The report identified twelve challenges of AI governance that policymakers and the frameworks they design must meet.
- The bias challenge: AI can introduce or perpetuate biases that society finds unacceptable.
- The privacy challenge: AI can allow individuals to be identified and personal information about them to be used in ways beyond what the public wants.
- The misrepresentation challenge: AI can allow the generation of material that deliberately misrepresents someone’s behaviour, opinions or character.
- The access to data challenge: The most powerful AI needs very large datasets, which are held by few organisations.
- The access to compute challenge: The development of powerful AI requires significant compute power, access to which is limited to a few organisations.
- The black box challenge: Some AI models and tools cannot explain why they produce a particular result, which is a challenge to transparency requirements.
- The open-source challenge: Requiring code to be openly available may promote transparency and innovation; allowing it to be proprietary may concentrate market power but allow more dependable regulation of harms.
- The IP and copyright challenge: Some AI models and tools make use of other people’s content: policy must establish the rights of the originators of this content, and these rights must be enforced.
- The liability challenge: If AI models and tools are used by third parties to do harm, policy must establish whether developers or providers of the technology bear any liability for harms done.
- The employment challenge: AI will disrupt the jobs that people do and that are available to be done. Policymakers must anticipate and manage the disruption.
- The international coordination challenge: AI is a global technology, and the development of governance frameworks to regulate its uses must be an international undertaking.
- The existential challenge: Some people think that AI is a major threat to human life: if that is a possibility, governance needs to provide protections for national security.
Under the IP and copyright challenge the report outlined “policy must establish the rights of the originators of this content, and these rights must be enforced”.
The report highlighted that while the adoption of AI models and tools has contributed to revenue generation within the entertainment industry, particularly in domains like video games and audience analytics, concerns have arisen regarding the unauthorised "scraping" of copyrighted content from online sources.
These concerns have prompted ongoing legal cases that are expected to set precedents in this arena, said the report.
Stakeholders share views on AI
Representatives from the creative industries told the committee in a House of Commons meeting on May 10, 2023, that they had a desire to forge a mutually beneficial resolution with the AI sector, possibly in the form of a licensing framework for using copyrighted content to train AI models and tools.
Jamie Njoku-Goodwin, CEO of UK Music, welcomed greater engagement but noted a lack of evidence of companies seeking licences to use works for AI training.
And Hayleigh Bosher, an IP researcher at Brunel University, emphasised that AI and tech firms would also reap benefits from upholding copyright and IP rights.
The report noted that the UK Intellectual Property Office has initiated the development of a voluntary code of practice concerning copyright and AI, in collaboration with technology, creative, and research sectors.
This guidance aims to facilitate AI companies' access to copyrighted works as inputs for their models while ensuring that appropriate protections, such as labelling, are in place for the benefit of copyright holders.
A draft code is expected to be published by the end of July.
Comparison with US and EU strategy
The report also examined how the UK government has responded, and how this compares to other countries and jurisdictions.
The EU member states and European Parliament are currently negotiating a draft AI act that “would implement a risk-based approach with AI models and tools grouped into risk categories and some, such as biometric surveillance, emotion recognition and predictive policing, banned altogether,” said the report.
In the US, the report said the White House has called on AI developers “to take action to ensure responsible innovation and appropriate safeguards, and protect people’s rights and safety”.
On August 30, the US Copyright Office launched a notice of inquiry and request for comments on copyright and AI, via the Federal Register.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said that a proposed legislative approach will be outlined in the autumn of 2023, the report said.
UK government's code of practice on copyright and AI
Aside from the UKSITC report, the UK government is working with users and rights holders on a code of practice on copyright and AI, announced June 29.
This code will aim to make licences for data mining more available and will help overcome barriers that AI firms and users are facing, ensuring there are protections for rights holders.
The code came after Sir Patrick Vallance completed a review on pro-innovation regulation for digital technologies and recommended that the government should clarify the relationship between IP and generative AI.
The government published a response on 15 March 2023, accepting this recommendation.
This ensures that the UK copyright framework “promotes and rewards investment in creativity and also supports the ambition for the UK to be a world leader in research and AI innovation.”
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