Nick Clegg, former British Deputy Prime Minister and Meta head of global affairs, has said that if AI companies “asked permission” from the creative community to use their works it would “kill” the AI industry.
Clegg was speaking at an event promoting his new book and said that the creative community should have the right to opt out of having their work used to train AI models.
However, he said it was not feasible for AI companies to ask for creatives’ consent to use their work first.
“I think the creative community wants to go a step further,” Clegg said according to The Times. “Quite a lot of voices say, ‘You can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data.”
“I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work,” Clegg said. “And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”
At present, there is significant wrangling in the industry over what AI businesses can and cannot use to generate new content.
News Corp, for instance, sued internet browser Brave alleging it of unlawfully “scraping” and indexing content from News Corp-owned publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post and demanded compensation. Last year, News Corp signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI that allows it to scrape News Corp’ content to train ChatGPT.
In late 2023, the Albanese government established the Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Reference Group (CAIRG). Since then, the group has held four meetings on the feedback it received from CAIRG participants on its consultation on copyright and AI transparency issues.
The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) has called AI an “existential” threat to the creative industries.
“We’re not opposed to AI as such… AI is being used already to drive super profits for producers, platforms off the back of the cultural workforce, musicians, performers, journalists, crew, filmmakers but also communities and audiences by turning them into quasi-producers themselves…” said Paul Davies, the Union’s campaigns director.
LinkedIn has also become a hotbed of discussions around AI and the use of people’s likeness and copyrighted works to train models and produce ‘new’ content. Just take a look at the below:
Lucio Ribeiro, formerly of Optus, Seven West Media, and Nine, has also recently stepped into a new role with TBWA, serving as its first chief AI and innovation officer.
In that new role, he’s planning to operate across internal and client-facing functions—helping scale AI capabilities throughout TBWA. This includes the use of AI across internal operational functions, helping clients with their AI requirements and enhancing the creative process.
“My move to TBWA reflects how excited I am about the promise of AI as an enabler of creativity. In the past, big creative projects were often limited by high production costs. Sometimes the best ideas would not get off the ground because they were considered too hard or costly to execute,” Ribeiro told the Cairns Crocodiles festival earlier this month.
