Contribution
My Lords, it has been a privilege to listen to today’s debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, really has opened the floodgates to expressions of support for human creativity. I thank her for tabling her Motion. I also thank the Minister for setting out the Government’s position and their support for the creative industries.
I suppose I straddle the world of AI and creativity as much as anybody in this House. I co-founded the All-Party Group on Artificial Intelligence and I have been a member of the All-Party Group on Intellectual Property for many years. That is reflected in my interests, both as an advisor to DLA Piper on AI policy and regulation, and as the newly appointed chair of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. I declare those interests, which are more than merely formal.
The subject matter of the amendments in this group is of profound importance for the future of our creative industries and the development of AI in the UK: the critical intersection of AI training and copyright law, and, specifically, the urgent need for transparency. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, described, the rapid development of AI, particularly large language models, relies heavily on vast volumes of data for training. This has brought into sharp focus the way copyright law applies to such activity. It was impossible to miss the letter over the weekend from 400 really important creatives, and media and creative business leaders urging support for her Motion 49A. Rights holders, from musicians and authors to journalists and visual artists, are rightly concerned about the use of their copyrighted material to train AI models, often without permission or remuneration, as we have heard. They seek greater control over their content and remuneration when it is used for this purpose, alongside greater transparency.
Like others, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who has brilliantly championed the cause of creators and the creative industries throughout the passage of this Bill in her tabling of a series of crucial amendments. Her original amendments on Report, passed in this House but deleted by the Government in the Commons and then retabled in the Commons on Report by my honourable friends, aimed to make existing UK copyright law enforceable in the age of generative AI. The core argument behind Amendment 49B, which encapsulates the essence of the previous amendments, is that innovation in the AI field should not come at the expense of the individuals and industry creating original content.
The central plank of the noble Baroness’s proposals, and one these Benches strongly support, is the requirement for transparency from AI developers regarding the copyrighted material used in their training data. Her Amendment 49B specifically requires the Secretary of State to make regulations setting out strict transparency requirements for web crawlers and general-purpose AI models. This would include disclosing the identity and purpose of the crawlers used, identifying their owners and, crucially, keeping records of where and when copyrighted material is gathered. This transparency is vital for ensuring accountability and enabling copyright holders to identify potential infringements and enforce their rights.
The Minister described the process in the consultation on AI and copyright, published last December. That consultation proposed a text and data mining exception that would allow AI developers to train on material unless the rights holder expressly reserved their rights or opted out. The arguments against this proposed opt-out mechanism are compelling; they have been made by many noble Lords today and have been voiced by many outside, as we have heard. This mechanism shifts the burden on to creators to police the use of their work and actively opt out, placing an undue responsibility on them.
This approach undermines the fundamental principles of copyright, effectively rewarding the widespread harvesting or scraping of copyrighted material that has occurred without permission or fair remuneration. The Government’s proposed text and data-mining exception, which it appears that they are no longer proposing—as the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, asked, perhaps the Minister can clarify the Government’s position and confirm that that is indeed the case—risks harming creative sectors for minimal gain to a small group of global tech companies and could erode public trust in the AI sector. As the noble Baroness observed, this approach is selling the creative industries down the river. Voluntary measures for transparency proposed by the Government are insufficient. Clear legal obligations are needed.