Paul McCartney, Elton John and other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping
- Reference: 1747052688
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/05/12/uk_creatives_ai_letter/
- Source link:
Signatories include some of the UK's best-known artists such as musicians Paul McCartney, Elton John, Coldplay, writer/director Richard Curtis, artist Antony Gormley, and actor Ian McKellen.
The UK government proposes to [1]allow exceptions to copyright rules in the case of text and data mining needed for AI training, with an opt-out option for content producers.
[2]
"Government amendments requiring an economic impact assessment and reports on the feasibility of an 'opt-out' copyright regime and transparency requirements do not meet the moment, but simply leave creators open to years of copyright theft," the letter says.
[3]
[4]
The group – which also includes Kate Bush, Robbie Williams, Tom Stoppard, and Russell T Davies – said the amendments tabled for the Lords debate would create a requirement for AI firms to tell copyright owners which individual works they have ingested.
"Copyright law is not broken, but you can't enforce the law if you can't see the crime taking place. Transparency requirements would make the risk of infringement too great for AI firms to continue to break the law," the letter states.
[5]
Baroness Kidron, who proposed the amendment, said: "How AI is developed and who it benefits are two of the most important questions of our time. The UK creative industries reflect our national stories, drive tourism, create wealth for the nation, and provide 2.4 million jobs across our four nations. They must not be sacrificed to the interests of a handful of US tech companies."
[6]US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired
[7]Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists
[8]AI training license will allow LLM builders to pay for content they consume
[9]Copyright-ignoring AI scraper bots laugh at robots.txt so the IETF is trying to improve it
The letter was also signed by a number of media organizations, including the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, and the National Union of Journalists. Baroness Kidron added: "The UK is in a unique position to take its place as a global player in the international AI supply chain, but to grasp that opportunity requires the transparency provided for in my amendments, which are essential to create a vibrant licensing market."
Labour peer Lord Brennan of Canton backed the amendment. "We cannot let mass copyright theft inflict damage on our economy for years to come," he said. "Transparency over AI inputs will unlock tremendous economic growth, positioning the UK as the premier market for the burgeoning trade in high-quality AI training data."
Debate rages as to whether AI training should disregard copyright. For example, [10]The Atlantic alleges that Meta , along with other GenAI devs, may have accessed millions of copyrighted books and research papers through the LibGen dataset. Researchers have speculated that OpenAI may have done the same, with [11]the allegations a part of lawsuits over the alleged use of copyrighted material. UK authors were alarmed to find their copyrighted books in the database.
Meanwhile, the [12]head of the US Copyright Office has reportedly been fired , a day after the agency concluded that AI models' use of copyrighted material went beyond existing doctrines of fair use. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-and-artificial-intelligence/copyright-and-artificial-intelligence
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aCIbHR3ezlDjyunEIgg0bwAAAAw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aCIbHR3ezlDjyunEIgg0bwAAAAw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aCIbHR3ezlDjyunEIgg0bwAAAAw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aCIbHR3ezlDjyunEIgg0bwAAAAw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/12/us_copyright_office_ai_copyright/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/worldcon_uses_ai/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/24/uk_publishing_body_launches_ai/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/09/ietf_ai_preferences_working_group/
[10] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/03/openai_copyright_bypass/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/12/us_copyright_office_ai_copyright/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Debate?
Starmer tole The Guardian he doesn't have dreams.
On BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2020, instead of choosing a novel, he opted to take a detailed atlas with shipping lanes, emphasizing practicality over literary preference
More recently, during a 2025 school visit, Starmer told children his favourite book is Roy of the Rovers, a football comic.
Not exactly Luvvies for Labour or the man to invite Oasis at Downing Street
Don't Care
It's ridiculous that this is even being debated.
It's no more a copyright violation for LLMs to use copyrighted training data than it is for a human to read a fucking book.
What comes out is so mixed and mashed that it's NOT even remotely related to what went in. Hack 'artists' need to STFU.
LLMs have a LOT of problems, not the least of which is their climate destruction. Fucking copyright bullshit isn't one of them.
Re: Don't Care
I was wondering where the downvote on my post came from.... then read your response.
Ah.
Either the *copyrighted* work of all these authors and creators is valuable - and improves the quality of output from LLMs - or it is not. If it is valuable, then yes, these guys have every right to retain their intellectual property and determine the terms under which it is used. That's the same reason why you can't just "read a fucking book" without paying the specific publisher who printed it. It's astonishing that you don't grasp that basic agreement you've accepted... I could insert a 'books growing on trees' joke here, but assume it would go over your head.
If it is not valuable, then the LLM companies have no "fucking" reason to be using someone else's content.
Re: Don't Care
> read a fucking book.
Well, the Kama Sutra is in the public domain. So that is not a very good example
Re: Don't Care
"so mixed and mashed that it's NOT even remotely related to what went in."
That's not the point. The point is that the LLM has to ingest the work in its entirety in order to build its model. This is not fair use. Fair use only allows use of a small fragment of the original work.
If the LLM can be made to work with a couple of paragraphs of a book or 30s of a song then, sure, that's fair use. But this is not what's happening.
Opt out
“…a requirement for AI firms to tell copyright owners which individual works they have ingested”
Governments really have no idea sometimes (often?). It’s TOO FUCKING LATE when told your stuff has already been stolen!!!
The concept of “opt out” should be fucking illegal. It should always be “opt in”. Not just for this, but for everything - web sites slurping your data, mobile phone companies spamming you to buy shit you don’t want and didn’t ask for, etc etc.
Do it your way
> More than 400 of the UK's leading media and arts professionals have written to the prime minister
If they were half as creative as their promotional material would have us believe, they would have found a more memorable and persuasive way of getting their message to those who matter, than just writing something as mundane as a letter.
Re: Do it your way
I always find it a bit odd that in this day and age that ministers talk proudly of having written to someone asking for clarification etc.. I presume what really happens is a flunky gets the other party's flunky on the phone and they take it from there..
Re: Do it your way
You have to be a bit careful here. If it is written in a tracked correspondence (I would find it odd if the UK Parliament has some form of tracked memo or letter) then this carries a bit more weight that just picking up the phone. You can point to it having happened, which can be really important when something blows up.
If a minister says that they have written to someone, especially if they are speaking in the House, they will want to back it up with evidence should they be questioned about it.
Even if it is an email, I'm pretty certain that there is an audit trail of mails from/to MPs and ministers. This is why there is such a hoo-haa when conversations are carried out in closed WhatsApp or Signal spaces, or sent from personal mail accounts.
Re: Do it your way
absolutely, I say they should publish a [1]silent album from 1000 artists . That'll make the news.
[1] https://www.isthiswhatwewant.com/
You will get fsck'd
by AI wether you like it or not.
As a writer, Plagarism is already a problem and the likes of Amazon don't give a fuck. All they are interested in is sales and therefore $$$$$.
Although UK based, I now understand how to issue a DMCA takedown notice to the likes of AMZN.
It sucks and it will only get worse with AI.
you spend hours/days/months/years lovingly crafting a piece of work and within a few minutes of posting it evil bastards like Google will have sucked it into their AI and will use it to create work.
Eventually, it won't be worth posting anything. I'm seriously considering NOT making my next novel (some 450 pages) available on the internet.
Far Too Late
The creative works have already been stolen , not only from published authors but from everyone who has written anything on the internet.
The only hope is that humankind finally realises that AI-generated slop is no more than bullshit, and the whole destructive "AI" bubble bursts with a big bang.
Debate?
"Debate rages as to whether AI training should disregard copyright. For example, The Atlantic alleges that Meta, along with other GenAI devs, may have accessed millions of copyrighted books and research papers through the LibGen dataset. Researchers have speculated that OpenAI may have done the same, with the allegations a part of lawsuits over the alleged use of copyrighted material. UK authors were alarmed to find their copyrighted books in the database."
I don't think there's much debate going on. Various organisations have identified that AI training certainly does disregard copyright, and the corporate pirates insist that this is all ok, honest, please just go away.
The fact that creatives and Kidron are being sidelined by our own government shows just how successful corporate capture is when it comes to effective political lobbying. Apart from that one lone voice (being consistently voted down in Parliament), there is no-one else on any side of the political spectrum considering how much our rich cultural heritage is worth - either financially, or to the social cohesion of our country.
Our MPs, and the Lords should be ashamed.