CHEQUES AND BALANCES

This week the Data Use And Access Bill returned to the House of Commons after the House of Lords had once again backed an amendment which would make AI companies reveal all the copyrighted material used in their Large Language Models. 

Outside The Palace of Westminster, celebrities from ranging from Dua Lipa to the RSC voiced their support, including 50% of the most successful songwriting partnership of all time, Sir Paul McCartney (the bill faces a long and winding road, with the Lords set on fixing a hole rather than trying to helter skelter it).

In short, the aim of the Lords amendment (tabled by cross-bench peer/film-maker Baroness Beebon Kidron) is to protect artists work from being used to ‘train’ Artificial Intelligence and would require AI firms to be transparent about the material they have absorbed and made accessible (nickable?) to all the AI’s subscribers, anywhere in the world, without the creators of the work receiving a red cent in return.

Baroness Kidron:

“I want to reject the notion that those of us who are against government plans are against technology. Creators do not deny the creative and economic value of AI, but we do deny the assertion that we should have to build AI for free with our work, and then rent it back from those who stole it... My lords, it is an assault on the British economy and it is happening at scale to a sector worth £120bn to the UK, an industry that is central to the industrial strategy and of enormous cultural import.”

And this is where she really nails it (IMO):

"There's no industrial sector in the UK that government policy requires to give its property or labour to another sector - which is in direct competition with it - on a compulsory basis, in the name of balance, ...The government has got it wrong. ...They have been turned by the sweet whisperings of Silicon Valley who have stolen - and continue to steal every day we take no action - the UK's extraordinary, beautiful and valuable creative output. ...Silicon Valley has persuaded the government that it's easier for them to redefine theft than make them pay for what they have stolen."

For its part, the UK government appears to believe, or perhaps chooses to believe, that the current status quo is effectively hobbling both the creative and tech sectors and needs new law to set them free. But as last week’s 3 minute read pointed out, the UK government has over a hundred and fifty years of failing to support, nurture and protect the ideas, inventiveness and creativity of its citizens.  A precious resource which other countries rightly regard as providing the lifeblood of any economy, and which they are only too happy for the UK to run off into their own superbly constructed and zealously-defended national vaults.

Easy Come, Easy Go

I am sure that there are some uniquely blessed creative folk out there for whom an idea effortlessly becomes a fully-developed piece of work in the twinkling of an eye. And I can’t help thinking that Team Starmer sees this miraculous kind of ‘pot-noodle’ production-line represents business as usual for everyone involved in the creative industries. So they have no objection to the nation’s entire creative output be hoovered up, free of charge, by the Large Language Models like whale sharks hoovering up plankton.

Seconds away, Round Two

On Thursday the Government won the latest round of this wrestling match with the Lords

The debate was led by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, The Right Honourable Peter Kyle, who said that the government’s data bill ‘wasn’t intended to be about AI and copyright.’ Adding:  ‘We need to bring both sectors together. We need to have workable implementable solutions that have grip in the digital age. And then have the confidence of both Houses to get if forward. And it is the process for which we will deliver it that I am asking members across this House and in the Other Place (the Lords) to offer me a degree of trust.’

Mr Kyle then promised to ‘get it right’, and the Commons then voted to reject the Lords amendment by 195 votes to 124. The Bill will now go back to the House of Lords, who may once again vote in favour of their amendment, or give in to the Government.

So Mr Kyle, in the interest of the ‘balance’ that the Government is apparently seeking to achieve, please consider some of less tangible (but no less real, or less painful) production costs underlying the material the bill seeks to give away as freebies:

Like when your ‘day’ job finishes at 11pm and you’re home by midnight, hunched over the gas cooker, in coat and scarf, your keyboard balanced on the hob so that you can use the oven as a heater …winter after winter

And another Christmas goes by without you being able to buy half-decent presents for nieces and nephews

Or when your own children can’t understand why you’re ‘working’ when you’re supposed to be on holiday, or sleeping when you should be playing, because you’ve been writing through the night.

And when the big break turns to heartbreak because some vulture takes advantage of the lack of intellectual property protection in this country, so there are years (or decades) when the pain of the rip-off (and accompanying legal bills) stop you putting pen to paper altogether.

But that kind of thing must only must happen to the ‘slow horses’, right Mr Kyle?

The supremely gifted international best seller, Mick ‘Slough House’ Herron, who was Boris Johnson’s contemporary at Oxford, could only make a living from his writing after his ‘fourth or fifth’ published novel

James ‘LA Confidential’ Ellroy was still caddying at a golf club until after his fifth book had been published

A 2022 report from the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) found that the median income of full-time authors had fallen by more than 60% since 2006, to £7,000 a year.

DT 24 May 2025