Nick Clegg, former UK Deputy Prime Minister and former head of global policy at Meta, said that requiring copyright holders to obtain permission to use their content to train AI models would "destroy the AI industry overnight," The Register reports.
Speaking at a literary festival in East Sussex, Clegg criticised the UK parliament's attempts to introduce amendments to the Information Bill. He said the idea of asking permission from every creator was "impractical" because AI systems need vast amounts of data to train, but he agreed that authors should be able to opt out of using their work.
Amendments to ban the use of copyrighted content without the owner's consent were supported by the House of Lords but later blocked by the government. Creative industry figures including Elton John, Paul McCartney and Kate Bush have spoken out against such exemptions for technology companies.
In response to the controversy, some initiatives are pushing a licensing model that allows LLM developers to use copyrighted content with compensation to publishers. However, large companies such as OpenAI have already used copyrighted works without consent, as confirmed by independent research.
According to Baroness Kidron, who promoted the amendments, the creative industry cannot be sacrificed for the interests of American technology giants.
By the way, before the amendments were made, over a thousand British musicians came together and released an "empty" album called "Is This What We Want?" The essence of this performance was to record empty concert halls and recording studios, which is what you would expect if companies were allowed to use content without consent.