Unlock free Digest editor
Roula Khalaf, editor of FT, chooses her favorite story in this weekly newsletter.
As you can expect, the protests were creative, even strange. More than 1,000 artists, including Annie Lennox and Kate Bush, supported the edition this week of A quiet album containing nothing more than a background noise of study. 47-minute album called Is that what we want? Contains 12 songs called: The. British. Government. The sea. Not. Legalize. Music. Theft. To. Benefit. Ai. Companies.
As a musical experience, album – Available on Spotify – Not highly recommended. Personally, I prefer John Cage 4’33 ”, a composition with three movements where the orchestra does not play a note, mostly because it is shorter.
But this mute protest is part of the world’s rebellion of creative artists and content companies against unauthorized use of their work by large technological companies. In the United States, the authors of the guild and 17 individual authors, including Jodi Picoult and Jonathan Franzen, following the more traditional American a form of protest by suing Openi and Microsoft for a copyright violation, stating “Systemic theft on a mass scale.” Japanese newspaper publishers and editors’ association also protested against the AI Company “Freeriding at News Work”.
These disputes are a classic example of what happens when new technologies outweigh the laws written in an earlier era. When the intellectual ownership laws were adopted, no one could have imagined a day when massive companies would cut the whole internet as a data training for their generative AI models, and then would take out a convincing simulakra in songs, pictures, music and videos. But the principle that no one should profit from someone else’s intellectual property without consent should be left inviolable.
As in many other countries, the British government is currently fighting to divert principle and practice and update your intellectual ownership laws for AI age. As protests show, it’s not easy. Creative industries are crucial to the British economy. According to government numbers, they contributed £ 124 billion in gross value added to the economy in 2023, about 5 percent of the total number. On the other hand, the Government desperately wants to position the UK as a power plant adapted AI, behind the US and China.
The UK Government seems to be afraid that he will get out of the line with Trump’s administration due to technological policy, and also wants to distance himself from the intrusive EU regulations. Last month rules Published an AI ARA APPLICATION PLAN By saying current insecurity about intellectual ownership, it must be urgently resolved. He advised himself widely, but the exemption of “fair use” is played, which would welcome Ai Companies.
What is partially neglected in this discussion is that desperate AI companies need to get fresh content that has created a man to develop his models and how much they would pay if they could do so easily and legally. “We need to find new economic models where creatives can have new flow of revenues,” Altman, the Openi CEO of Openi, admitted in December.
As is happening, several launch experiments experimenting with such economic models, including the prorat.ai, Tollbit and Human Indie.ai. Prorata develops an answer engine that would pay off the share of AI company’s revenue to the formators of content whenever their work appeared in his answers. Tollbit allows AI bots and data scrapers to pay directly websites for their content and thus reduce legal insecurity. And the Human Native creates a two-sided market that allows AI creators to licensed data from the contents creator.
Just as the hackers pirate music from the record houses in the early 2000s-before the industry developed and allowed consumers to pay for music on the network of a network of creative industry experience their own “Napster Era”, claims James Smith, co-founder of Human Native. Some of these creative companies already fall into the licensing of individual contents with AI Company: Axel Springer, News Corp and FT have signed contracts with Openi while they are AGENCE FRANCE-PRESS united with Mistral. The human goal is to automate the process on the mass scale. “We want to be an infrastructure to enable data trading on the Internet,” Smith tells me.
The biggest of many differences between Napster’s era is still that pirates are no longer a small group of hackers, but a giant corporation with lobbying muscles. Revised legislation may be key to forcing the hands. However, mechanisms on a market are developed that could allow mutually useful solutions. If AI companies do not bite it harder on that carrots, they deserve to hit them with a big stick.
