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Government's rejection of AI bill amendment 'unjust', says Society of Authors' CEO Anna Ganley
Anna Ganley, CEO of the Society of Authors (SoA), criticised the “injustice” of the government’s stance on AI, after ministers blocked an amendment to a controversial AI bill which would require tech firms to disclose their use of copyright-protected material.
A special right that permits the House of Commons to overrule any House of Lords proposal that has cost implications – called “financial privilege” – was invoked during a debate on Wednesday 14th May, to deny an amendment aimed at giving copyright owners control over the use of their intellectual property.
It saw the government quash the Lords’ desire to ensure the success of an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill, which has twice won the backing of peers.
Introduced by digital safety expert and cross-bench peer Beeban Kidron, the proposed updates to the bill were most recently backed in a Lords vote earlier this month.
Significant players in the creative industries, from author Kate Mosse to theatre director Nicholas Hytner, have backed the amendment which would require AI firms to be upfront about how they scrape content from the internet to train AI, and have mandated that the Information Commissioner’s Office enforces such regulation.
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But in a House of Commons debate on Wednesday, Minister of State for Data Protection and Telecoms and Minister of State (Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism), Chris Bryant, insisted: “The best form of AI will be intelligent artificial intelligence. And just like any pipe, what comes out of it depends on what goes into it. If we have high-quality data going into AI, then it will produce high-quality data at the other end.”
Bryant claimed Kidron’s proposed changes to the bill would “do nothing” to ensure copyright protection and said the government was determined to deal with the question of “the whole issue in the round”, rather than “piecemeal” amendments.
Bryant told the House of Commons: “There is a really important part here for the different sectors within the creative industries. Word, image, music and sound will all probably need different technical solutions. That is the kind of nitty-gritty that we need to get into, which we can only really do when we consider the whole issue in the round, rather than just one specific aspect of it.”
Reflecting on the outcome of the debate, Ganley said: “AI tools have benefited tremendously from the hard work of authors across the UK, without their knowledge, and against their will, and the government seems content to let these practices continue for the sake of protecting the prospects and interests of the tech sector."
Kidron intends to table a rephrased amendment before the bill’s return to the House of Lords, and said that the Labour government had seemed to “abandon the labour force of an entire sector”, according to the Guardian.
Kidron said: “My inbox is filled with individual artists and global companies who are bewildered that the government would allow theft at scale and cosy up to those who are thieving. There is another way, but this government has chosen to ignore it.”
The SoA, together with the creative industries, and parliamentarians, will “continue to push the government to reconsider”, added Ganley.
