Large Language Models and Generative AI (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, and I pay tribute to the chair of the committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston, for her first-class chairing of what was a really complex issue to those of us who are not in the AI or tech industries. It was completely fascinating and very eye-opening—a masterclass.

Today I want to address one of the most pressing and critical issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell: the clear evidence that creatives and their living are in great danger. They are up against the overwhelming and overweening power of the big tech companies and what appeared to be a great deal of reluctance by the industry to concede that a way to remunerate for intellectual property use was vital. It was clear that the LLM industry is using the products of the creative industries to train AI and were text and data mining extensively for their own benefit without paying for it. As I listened to a cascade of excuses and rationales for not dealing with the issue, it was a real-life example of killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

At its most basic, it is critical that we recognise original work, deliver fair compensation, and respect creators’ rights and economic justice. We listened to all the arguments about who owns what, how you prove it, how it is all too difficult, that it is like reading a book or that somehow it is a public good. But in the end, creatives must be recompensed for the use of their creations. We need to ensure a sustainable creative economy. As the noble Baroness said, the creative industries are a massive economic driver for our national economy.

There is both a legal and an ethical responsibility to ensure that there is adherence to copyright laws. Those laws exist to protect the work of creators. As this field develops, and AI becomes more integrated into industries, it is a critical requirement and ethical responsibility of companies to respect intellectual property. It was clear from the evidence we heard that much of the data mining that has been going on has taken place without any permission from or compensation to the rights holders. Yes, there were esoteric discussions as to where copyright belonged: could it really be the original artist when somewhere in a black box—or maybe it was a sandbox, I cannot remember—fibres were creating something anew from the feed? That may be challenging, but the onus is on the AI industry and the Government to protect our creatives. As a group, and given their talents, they are not always paid well anyway. For them not to receive anything, when their work provides the basis for AI training for an industry that is going to grow wildly economically rich, is simply not acceptable.

Our copyright law is absolutely clear on this. Moreover, the evidence given to the committee, such as from the Society of Authors, noted that AI systems “would simply collapse” if they could not access original talent. It was equally clear from Dan Conway, CEO of the Publishers Association, in his evidence to the committee, that LLMs

“are infringing copyrighted content on an absolutely massive scale … when they collect the information”

and in

“how they store the information and how they handle it”.

There was clear evidence from model outputs that developers had used pirated content from the Books3 database, and he alleged that they were “not currently compliant” with UK law. Microsoft countered with the argument that, basically, they were offering a public good and therefore copyright laws should not apply to ideas—good try.

I was also interested to receive a briefing from UK Music, which is concerned—justly, in my view—that the Government might try to introduce further text and data mining copyright exceptions, which would allow AI service providers to train their systems on music without the consent of, or need to compensate, its creators. The oft-made suggestion, as raised by the noble Baroness, is an opt-out system. It seems relatively practical: you could opt in if you did not mind your stuff being used, or you could opt out. But it will not work. There are no existing, effective opt-out schemes that reliably opt out content from training. Doing so is quite impossible. There is no way to have control over whether downstream uses of original work are opted out of generative AI training, since there is no control for the artist over the URLs where they are hosted—perhaps we should look at extraterritorial law. The evidence suggests that the majority of people who have the option to opt out of generative AI training do not even realise that they have the option. Moreover, if opt-out schemes are adopted, publishers and copyright holders will have only the illusion of choice. If they opt out of AI training, they opt out of being findable on the internet altogether.

Record keeping has also been suggested—I do not think the committee covered this, but I stand to be corrected. Currently there is no stand-alone legal requirement in the UK to disclose the material that AI systems are trained on, beyond the data protection law framework. I believe that record keeping should be mandatory.

AI cannot create in a vacuum. It needs huge data sets, so often drawn from copyrighted materials, to function. Clearly, it would be much better to encourage collaboration between the tech industry and the creative industries, instead of AI becoming a threat or being a threat, as it is. I implore AI companies to accept this thesis and ensure that they are transparent about how their models are trained and which data is used.

There are a lot of ideas around about group licensing and so on. It would be far more productive if the LLMs worked with the creatives. A lot of creatives are individuals or small companies. They just do not have the means to enforce their IP rights through the legal process or to track how their works are being used in AI training. That is why the committee’s recommendation that the IPO code must ensure that creators are fully empowered to exercise their rights is so important, alongside the requirement for developers to make clear whether their web crawlers are being used to acquire data for generative AI training or for other purposes.

Ultimately, AI’s integration into the creative industries brings a host of economic, ethical and legal challenges, but the most essential part is protecting the rights of creators to ensure fairness in the distribution of economic value, so that creators and the AI industry can both thrive. I trust the Government will ensure that the committee’s recommendations are implemented in full.

AI: Intellectual Property Rights

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

Perhaps my noble friend will forgive me if I gaze into a crystal ball for a moment and predict that the eventual solution to this will involve three elements: first, some modifications to our copyright legislation; secondly, some use of technology to enable a solution; and thirdly, internationally accepted standards of interoperability in any eventual solution. We engage widely with techUK and other technology partners, but above all we engage extensively internationally. I point to our specific engagements with the World Intellectual Property Organization, the UN agency the ITU, and of course the follow-up to the AI Safety Summit, which we are co-hosting in Seoul in a couple of weeks’ time.

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, what action are the Government taking to compel AI companies to implement measures to monitor and report IP infringements?

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

One of the principles we set out in our AI White Paper is transparency. That principle—repeated across the OECD and in the EU’s AI Act—will go a long way towards doing what the noble Baroness asks. There are, though, a number of technical difficulties in implementing transparency—not legally, from our side, but rather, the computer science problems associated with processing the very large quantities of data required to generate true transparency.

King’s Speech

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and I congratulate all those who made their maiden speeches. It reminds us all for a moment of our own maiden speeches. Mine was three minutes long, as I did not know I was allowed extra time.

I am worried about the state of our democracy for many reasons, but today I want to focus on the damage being done by the Government’s creeping control of what they permit we the people to be told, and who they will permit to tell it to us. A 2019 Freedom House report, entitled Media Freedom: A Downward Spiral, said:

“The fundamental right to seek and disseminate information through an independent press is under attack, and part of the assault has come from an unexpected source. Elected leaders in many democracies, who should be press freedom’s staunchest defenders, have made explicit attempts to silence critical media voices and strengthen outlets that serve up favourable coverage. The trend is linked to a global decline in democracy itself: The erosion of press freedom is both a symptom of and a contributor to the breakdown of other democratic institutions and principles, a fact that makes it especially alarming”.


It is happening to us and it is happening right now, under our noses.

According to Freedom House’s Freedom in the World data, media freedom has been deteriorating around the world over the past decade, with new forms of repression taking hold in open societies such as ours, and in authoritarian states. Who would think that we would be on the way to being an authoritarian state?

The trend is most acute in Europe—and despite Brexit, we are still in Europe—which was previously a bastion of well-established freedoms. The guidelines for the Government Communication Service, for example, say that dealings with journalists

“should be objective and explanatory, not biased or polemical”,

and

“should not be—and not liable to being misrepresented as—party political”.

The guidelines also state:

“To work effectively, media officers must establish their impartiality and neutrality with the news media, and ensure that they deal with all news media even-handedly.”


I am sure that your Lordships remember when Suella Braverman—now the ex-Home Secretary and author of a love letter today to Rishi Sunak—went to Rwanda to showboat her care for refugees coming to this country. She excluded the Guardian, the Mirror, the i, the Independent and the BBC, albeit in the end BBC Africa-based journalists did manage to get a look in. Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner condemned it as a “chilling” pattern of behaviour from the Government. The editor-in-chief of the Mirror, Alison Phillips, also warned of “really damaging” consequences from the way press places were handled on the visit. She wrote:

“A single instance of the government excluding journalists from newspapers and broadcasters would be chilling enough, but this is not a one off. Rather, it is becoming a pattern of behaviour whereby this government excludes journalists and selectively chooses reporters from sympathetic papers to cover ministerial trips and visits.”


Martin Bright, then editor-at-large at Index on Censorship, which works to defend freedom of expression, said:

“We are concerned to hear that journalists from organisations judged to be critical of the government’s immigration policy have not been invited to accompany the Home Secretary on her trip to Rwanda. Democracy depends on an open and transparent relationship between government and the media, where all journalists are able to scrutinise the government. Index on Censorship believes that access to government ministers, both domestically and as part of international visits, should not be treated as a reward for favourable coverage”.


It was not a single occurrence, because this actually happened less than a year after journalists from the Guardian, the Financial Times and the Mirror were blocked from joining the then Home Secretary, Priti Patel, on her trip to Rwanda to sign the original asylum deal. And it is not just trips, because in 2020 political journalists, including the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and ITV’s Robert Peston, staged a walkout after Downing Street communications staff attempted to brief some journalists but not others— presumably the ones they did not like. Those excluded by former Mirror and Sun journalist Lee Cain included journalists from PA, the Mirror, the i, Huffpost UK, PoliticsHome and the Independent.

One of the Guardian journalists who would have been on the Rwanda flight was Rajeev Syal. He told me yesterday that, on both occasions, the Guardian made representations to the Society of Editors and complained to the Home Office, and that the exclusions came from the Home Secretary’s office on both occasions, not from civil servants. Following the most recent exclusion, the Guardian, the Mirror and others were invited to a meeting at the Home Office by members of the Home Office press and media operation to discuss differences. While this resulted in a thawing of relations, there have been no written commitments or guarantees that exclusions would not take place in the future.

The guidelines are insufficient; in fact, they are totally useless. We need legislation, and sadly there was nothing in the gracious Speech to ensure that this practice and the consequent threat to our democracy was halted in perpetuity. I just want a simple Bill introduced: a media inclusivity Bill that prohibits the Government, whatever Government, whether Labour, Conservative or Lib Dem—I wish—from excluding broadcasters or journalists whom they feel may not be on their side, or who may write what they do not want to hear; and that will prohibit them from excluding specific media from covering them on foreign visits they are making, from speeches they are delivering or from briefings they are giving, or any other occasion to which media are invited. There must be no exclusion of particular media because the Government of the day wish to eliminate potential criticism: our democracy literally depends on it.