Cambridge members of Society of Authors urge Daniel Zeichner MP to help protect their work from AI tech giants

Cambridge members of the Society of Authors have voiced “considerable alarm” at the government’s plans to allow technology giants to “ignore British copyright law” and use their work to train artificial intelligence models.

The government launched a consultation in December on copyright and AI in which it proposed an exception to existing copyright laws to allow text and data mining for AI developers.

Rights holders would have to opt out in order to protect their work from this use.

“This exception will undermine long-established intellectual property rights to the benefit of generative AI companies,” warn all 28 Cambridge members of the Society of Authors in a letter to Cambridge MP and government minister Daniel Zeichner.

With the consultation coming to close on Tuesday, 25 February, they tell him: “The Labour government would allow years of work and research, painfully gestated and crafted ideas, and the divine sparks of inspiration by millions of creatives to be exploited in a rush to appease cynical tech giants.

“We believe the government is making a big mistake. Excluding creative works from scraping would not jeopardise or impinge the more genuinely useful applications of AI. The UK’s creative industries are worth £125bn to the economy and are growing at five times the rate of the economy as a whole.”

The letter, signed by authors and novelists including Dr Una McCormack, Pippa Goodhart and Susan Grossey, was co-ordinated by Amy Gray, who told the Cambridge Independent: “My own forthcoming book, a biography of the Duchess of Atholl MP, has taken me five years of archive research, including at Cambridge University Library. Much of the content in my book has never been published before. Under the government’s plan, I fear that my work could be ‘scraped’ and made available for free online without me being paid for it.”

The letter-writers call for copyright protection, licensing arrangements so that they can be remunerated and transparency over where AI is used.

But they are at pains to point out that they see benefits in AI.

They tell Mr Zeichner: “There are many excellent uses of AI and many examples in our own city of companies doing this kind of research in a way that is likely to benefit the health of people and the planet.

“These could include using health data to accelerate research into innovative medicines, simplifying traffic management systems and tracking the migration patterns of endangered species. Crucially, this kind of data and pattern analysis on a huge scale and at speed is something which humans cannot do.

“But AI used for these purposes is not the same as the generative AI that is trained on the work of creative professionals. This kind of AI cannot create on its own.

“It depends on pirating, plagiarising and exploiting the work of human creators by ‘scraping’ creative works protected by copyright, such as music, images, videos, and literary works including books and news articles, from the internet without permission or payment.

“The Labour government would allow years of work and research, painfully gestated and crafted ideas, and the divine sparks of inspiration by millions of creatives to be exploited in a rush to appease cynical tech giants.”

When announcing the consultation, the government said: “Rights holders are finding it difficult to control the use of their works in training AI models and seek to be remunerated for its use. AI developers are similarly finding it difficult to navigate copyright law in the UK, and this legal uncertainty is undermining investment in and adoption of AI technology.

“This status quo cannot continue. It risks limiting investment, innovation, and growth in the AI sector, and in the wider economy.”

An exception to copyright law for “text and data mining” would improve “access to content by AI developers”, the government suggested, while “allowing rights holders to reserve their rights and thereby prevent their content being used for AI training”.

The writers, who also include Anne Rooney, Rosemary Hayes, James Richards and Chloe Savage, conclude: “We do not support the new exception to copyright proposed in a consultation launched by the government. The priority should be to ensure that current copyright laws are respected and enforceable.”

Mr Zeichner was contacted for comment.

See the consultation at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-and-artificial-intelligence.