Britain's AI Copyright War: Imagination vs. Machines

Should AI tech companies be allowed to scrape human created content off the net, upload it to their systems and use it to provide 'enhanced' content, without paying the human creators of that original content...?

The Tech companies argue this scraping is "fair use", not so the creative industries who see this as theft of their members' content.

I mnean my immediate sympathies are with the human creatives, not necessarily out of any empathy, more because arguing that this kind of industrial-scale scraping is 'fair' is so blatently disingenuine that it's insulting.

Creative Britain at Risk?

The creative economy of the UK is not some sideline activity: the creative industries generated £126 billion of gross value added in 2022 and employed 2.4 million people.

And if if you want to go humannistc these aren't just $$$ figures — they're a living community of writers, musicians, designers, filmmakers, and others.

The goverment's 'strip-mine' line...

The Starmer government seems to be coming out as pretty open towards AI. They are pinning a lot of hopes for national economic growth on the tech sector and so to date have allowed them to strip-mine whatever creative property there is, with no consequences.

however there is no guarantee the AI industry will ever contribute as much economic value or employment as Britain's creative industries already do.

And if Google and Facebook and others are allowed to profit from other human beings' creative output without permission or reward, we risk stripping one of Britain's most robust and most humane industries naked for speculative AI wealth.

And most of that wealth is going to be sucked out of Britain too, along with the life-blood of the creative industries!

Striking the Right Balance

Progress in technology does not have to be at the cost of creators. Open copyright frameworks and licensing systems can ensure AI companies pay back the data they draw from, just like any other company drawing on copyrighted material.

Protecting creators today isn't simply good ethics — it's good economics.