AI copyright warning as 5 major risks outlined in UK Lords report
UK Lords warn unlicensed AI training threatens creative industries as concerns grow over AI copyright protections.
Concerns about AI copyright are rising after a House of Lords committee report. The report warns that unlicensed use of creative works for AI training threatens the UK’s creative industries.
Large AI systems rely on vast amounts of human-created content, often used without clear consent or compensation. Such developments have intensified debates around AI copyright protections.
The committee argues that the key issues are not the copyright framework itself, but the widespread unlicensed use of protected works and AI developers’ lack of transparency.
The lack of clarity prevents rightsholders from knowing whether their works are being used or from enforcing their rights, raising critical questions about the practical application of AI copyright rules.
The report urges the government to reject the proposed commercial text and data mining exception, introduce stronger protections against unauthorised digital replicas, and safeguard against AI outputs that imitate a creator’s style, voice, or identity.
The committee also calls for legal transparency in AI training data, backing the development of a licensing market, and standards for rights-reservation, data provenance, labelling AI-generated content, and support for UK-governed AI models within a robust AI copyright framework.
Baroness Keeley, committee chair, warned: ‘Our creative industries face a clear and present danger from uncredited and unremunerated use of copyrighted material to train AI models.
Photographers, musicians, authors, and publishers are seeing their work fed into AI models, which then produce imitations that take employment and earning opportunities from original creators.’
Keeley added: ‘AI may contribute to our future economic growth, but the UK creative industries create jobs and economic value now.
In 2023, the creative industries delivered £124 billion of economic value to the UK, and this is set to grow to £141 billion by 2030. Watering down the protections in our existing copyright regime to lure the biggest US tech companies is a race to the bottom that does not serve UK interests. We should not sacrifice our creative industries for the AI jam tomorrow.’
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