In a moment of political clarity, President Donald Trump got the issue of artificial intelligence (AI) and copyright exactly right. At the launch of the U.S. AI Action Plan last night, the President laid down two key principles: AI should have the same right to learn as humans do, and without data, the West will lose the AI race. As the Labour government decides the fate of AI and copyright in the UK, it should heed Trump’s words.
The U.S. AI Action Plan sets a serious ambition to bring AI for the American people that maintains global leadership and builds a global alliance to counter China’s rising AI innovation. Intellectual property (IP) laws are a key lever to realising this ambition.
In his speech on the plan, Trump was blunt but accurate about IP laws: America isn’t going to have a “successful program” if every training input requires negotiating a contract. If humans can freely learn from publicly available information, AI should be allowed to do the same. Moreover, just as humans shouldn’t copy or plagiarise works, AI should not be allowed to copy or plagiarise.
That is the distinction Trump nailed, and a distinction UK policymakers keep missing. Learning from data is not the same as copying or reproducing it. The former is how intelligence—human or artificial—develops, something copyright has never protected. The latter squarely falls within copyright protection.
However, too many policymakers are blurring the line, delaying AI progress, and deterring serious AI R&D. The UK government wants to be a global leader in AI development, but little AI training actually takes place in the UK. Even Stability AI, one of the UK’s leading AI firms, trains its models abroad. That fact alone led Getty Images to drop its main copyright claim against the company. This situation will keep happening for as long as the UK government fails to adopt a commonsense approach to AI and copyright laws.
Moreover, training AI outside the UK takes with it any economic upside to domestic development and undermines government initiatives such as its AI Growth Zone (AIGZ) agenda—an initiative to provide the necessary compute to train powerful UK-based models that drive the Labour government’s election promises. Without UK-based AI training, AIGZs will serve no other purpose than expensive reminders of a promise unfulfilled.
Worse still, unnecessarily strict copyright rules for training AI will reduce the UK’s ability to fulfil its goal of “developing the next wave of AI innovation,” as well as shape global AI safety and security, because leading AI companies will look abroad for locales with more reasonable rules for AI development. But while the UK dithers on the permissibility of AI training, Beijing’s AI labs remain unburdened by licensing and unchallenged by AI companies outside the United States. They charge full speed ahead, pouring data into models and building tools that are beginning to outperform those built in the West.
For the UK, the path forward is clear. If the West is to counter China’s growing AI innovation efforts, it must, in the words of Donald Trump, “play by the same set of rules.” If the game is AI, the aim is to ensure Western-built AI models, then the UK’s rules must be “let AI train.”
Image Credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
