As policy makers in the UK weigh how to regulate the AI industry, Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and former Meta executive, claimed a push for artist consent would “basically kill” the AI industry.
Speaking at an event promoting his new book, Clegg said the creative community should have the right to opt out of having their work used to train AI models. But he claimed it wasn’t feasible to ask for consent before ingesting their work first.
“I think the creative community wants to go a step further,” Clegg said according to The Times. “Quite a lot of voices say, ‘You can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data.”
“I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work,” Clegg said. “And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”
A realistic take on the situation.
I fully agree, despite how much people hate AI, training itself isn’t infringement based on how copyright laws are written.
I think we need to treat it as the copier situation, the person who is distributing the copyright infringing material is at fault, not the tool used to create it.
I agree with both of you but it’s a bit more nuanced than that: what if someone not familiar with the original IPs asks for a ‘space wizard’ or an ‘Italian plumber cartoon’, it outputs Obi Wan or Mario, and they use it in their work? Who’s getting sued by Disney or Nintendo?