Is AI the insincerest form of flattery?

Ian Ritchie / The Herald Business HQ / April 2024

A MAJOR STUSHIE is currently brewing between our government and the UK creative community.The government has suggested that it would like to make the UK a dynamic and innovative economy for the development of new technology especially in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In particular, they have proposed that we should minimise barriers to innovation and allow AI systems to access copyright material in building their knowledge bases, creating data repositories which can then be used to build new creative material such as fresh news articles, stories, artworks and music.

Predictably, the creative community is up in arms. Sir Cameron Mackintosh, the producer of theatre hits such as Les Misérables and the Phantom of the Opera, has declared that this would be an “idiotic and undemocratic own goal” and he’s been joined by the likes of Elton John, Kate Bush, Tom Stoppard, Kate Mosse and Ed Sheeran in opposition to any weakening of UK copyright protection.

Peter Kyle, the minister for innovation has been accused of selling out an industry that is a major UK strength, worth an estimated £126 billion to the economy. His consultation has now closed, and their conclusions are due in the next few weeks.

However, the protests are quite understandable. If producers of new dramatic material can utilise an AI system to write scripts and music without having to pay any royalties to writers and composers, they may well be inclined to do just that.

The AI system would create the new material by plagiarising previous product stored in its repositories which has be be scraped from original imaginative content - content which would normally be protected by copyright.

Instead of calling it Artificial Intelligence, maybe it should be called Artificial Plagiarism.

In 2023, the threat to creatives from AI in Hollywood came to a head and the Writers Guild of America, representing 11,500 screenwriters, and joined by most actors, went on a long strike from May to September, halting almost all production of new film and television productions and causing mayhem and huge loss of revenue in the TV and film industries. Eventually they reached agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers in which they agreed to restrict use of AI in the development of new productions. Nevertheless, last year, Scarlett Johansson claimed that OpenAI recreated her voice in a new ChatGPT system and after protest, OpenAI removed the offending voice.

There have been suggestions that authors and composers could be allowed to opt out of having their content AI scanned, however Baroness Kidron, who is a film-maker and a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords, has proposed amendments which would require creatives to actively to opt-in rather than the opposite.

Over the years, there has been many examples of creatives opposing the development and adoption of new technologies: publishers worrying about the arrival of photocopiers allowing copying of content; music companies and artists complaining about people using tape and cassette recorders to avoid buying records; and filmmakers aiming to block the use of video and DVD recorders to copy movies and TV programmes.

In the late 1990s, file-sharing platforms like Napster, allowed easy and widespread illegal sharing of copyrighted music without permission before they were closed down and replaced by new legitimate services such as Spotify which pays due royalties to artists.

However, maybe instead of banning, opting-in or opting-out, the government could find a more imaginative solution to this problem.

Back in the second half of the 20th century, a technology futurist called Ted Nelson proposed a new system which he called Xanadu - the kind of environment that today we know as the world wide web.

His Xanadu system was too ahead of its time to be delivered, but Ted Nelson described it in detail in a book called Literary Machines.

Xanadu was intended to be the repository of all the world’s knowledge - and core to his system was the recognition and management of copyright material.

Copyright ownership was fundamental and as documents are edited or included in other works, the original ownership is maintained. In fact, no version is ever deleted, but any new versions or adaptations maintain the rights of the original author and any subsequent changes.

Unfortunately, when the world wide web was developed, it didn’t contain any embedded copyright protection as proposed in Xanadu, a crucial failure in the creation of the new publishing system.

However, it it might not be too late to fix this in AI - such a system could be incorporated in new AI systems designed to scrape creative material to measure transclusion of material, and then, every time a piece of content is used to inspire a new work, a new micro-payment could be raised and paid to the original author.

And creative rights would be respected and rewarded.