UK creative industries launch ‘Make it Fair’ campaign against AI content theft

• New 'Make It Fair' campaign wants to tackle 'content theft'
• British creatives band together to urge for stronger copyright law
• AI uses content without permission or compensation

Artificial intelligence and Large Language Models are trained on hoards of online information, including songs, articles, comments, books, drawings, pictures, and more - so if you’ve ever commented on an Instagram post, posted a photo to Twitter, or uploaded a video to YouTube - the likelihood is, your work has been used to train a model at some point or another.

These models don’t ask for permission, either, nor does it notify the creator - and these models make millions from the content. OpenAI reportedly used over a million hours of YouTube video data to train GPT-4, and Meta uses public posts from Instagram and Facebook to train its AI model - but British creatives are coming together to fight back.

Artists, singers, authors, journalists, and scriptwriters (and more) - who collectively generate over £120 billion per year for the nation's economy, have come together to urge the UK government to apply British copyright law to AI companies, and to ensure ‘content theft’ is not legitimised by leaving this issue unchecked.

Make It Fair

The ‘Make it Fair’ campaign comes at the end of the British government’s AI and copyright consultation period, in which it is reviewing ways to boost trust and transparency between sectors, and “ensuring AI developers have access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK and support innovation across the UK AI sector”.

Owen Meredith, the CEO of News Media Association, which launched the campaign, added the UK's “gold-standard” copyright laws have underpinned growth and job creation in the British economy, and without the content they produce, AI innovation would not exist.

“And for a healthy democratic society, copyright is fundamental to publishers’ ability to invest in trusted quality journalism,” Meredith said.

“The only thing which needs affirming is that these laws also apply to AI, and transparency requirements should be introduced to allow creators to understand when their content is being used. Instead, the government proposes to weaken the law and essentially make it legal to steal content.

AI is at the forefront of productivity discussions in the UK right now, as the PM released plans to ‘turbocharge AI’ into the public sector, including the idea to ‘unlock’ public data by handing it over to ‘researchers and innovators’ to train AI models.

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