Artificial Intelligence Opportunities Action Plan
Debate between Baroness Stowell of Beeston and Lord Vallance of Balham(1 month ago)
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Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, on behalf of the Communications and Digital Select Committee of your Lordships’ House, I am pleased to welcome the AI Opportunities Action Plan, with the exception of the recommendation that relates to copyright. We will come back to that. It is important to emphasise the extent to which change will be necessary to deliver on this plan. In particular, the Government have to acknowledge a change in mindset across Whitehall and the public sector.
Perhaps I could ask the Minister how the Government will ensure that the action plan benefits UK start-ups and scale-ups and does not entrench market dominance by the established players in this area.
Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for her input to date and on the important copyright issue. The question of market dominance is important. It is worth reflecting that Matt Clifford is an entrepreneur who deals with start-ups; the report is very strong on start-ups and what needs to be done to make sure that they are part of this, including what regulatory change needs to take place to encourage start-ups to do this. At the moment, it is quite difficult for them to navigate the system, including procurement. Government procurement is notoriously difficult for start-ups, and many of the specific aims of the plan pull that together to allow start-ups to access government procurement plans.
So there are very clear ambitions here to make this about growing an ecosystem of companies in this country, while recognising that many of the existing major companies, with which we will also have to work, are not here. Driving this forward will be a key task for DSIT right the way across government. It will need all-of-government activity, as outlined in the report.
Artificial Intelligence: Regulation
Debate between Baroness Stowell of Beeston and Lord Vallance of Balham(4 months ago)
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Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)
As the noble Viscount points out, the EU regulation has gone in a somewhat different direction in taking a very broad approach and not a sector-specific approach. In contrast, the US looks as though it is going down a similar sort of route to the one that we are taking. Of course, there will be a need for interoperability globally, because this is a global technology. I think that there will be consultation and interactions with both those domains as we consider the introduction of the AI Act, and we are starting an extensive consultation process over the next few months.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, I am somewhat concerned by the Minister’s reference to regulating the most powerful and general purpose models, because I fear that that is a pathway to closing down markets and preventing access to challenger firms. But, in the context of copyright, which is of concern to all content creators and certainly to publishers, are the Government considering a mandatory mechanism to ensure transparency, so that those publishers that choose to opt out their data from the training purposes are able to do so?
Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)
In passing, I will just reference the first part: even Eric Schmidt, at the investment summit on Monday, made the point that some sort of guard-rails and some sort of certainty for business are required in order to grow those most important models. There is a demand for something there and that is what we want to try to get right. It is not right to leave nothing as these models progress. I am sorry, I have completely forgotten the second point.
Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)
Yes—the question of intellectual property and transparency is important. We are consulting widely on this with the creative industries and with others. Indeed, in my own review, which I did for the previous Government when I was in my post as the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, I made the very clear point that we need to distinguish between the inputs to these models and what is required for intellectual property control there, and the outputs of the model, which goes back to the question about watermarking and understanding what component of the output is derived from which part of the input.