The Future of News (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Baroness Cash Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the report and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, on her chairmanship of the committee and the members who have done a lot of hard and meaningful work to deliver it. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Pack, on his maiden speech and look forward to hearing many more.

It is timely that we are having this debate, particularly as the Government’s consultation on a significant section of it—the scraping of data by AI—closed in February. There are not too many issues on which the BBC and the Daily Mail agree, but this is one, and I am pleased to welcome the considerable cross-party consensus on this issue. The noble Lord referred to the fact that copyright should not be any less meaningful in the context of these industries than it is in others.

A few weeks ago, the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine used her column to talk about the AI scraping issue. Like all good writers, she chose to show rather than tell, and quoted a conversation that she had had with a friend, who had been playing around with ChatGPT and asked it to give Sarah Vine’s views on a series of subjects. The ensuing column was highly entertaining, as her pieces so often are, and she used the point well to illustrate how vulnerable she and all other journalists and news organisations now are as their original material—their hard work, their unique creativity and their livelihood—is being hoovered up to train machines without any credit or compensation.

While we debate, that continues to happen every second. AI companies are scraping the web for millions of words, images and music beyond the news industries, often without permission and to the increasing alarm and detriment of the UK’s phenomenal £125 billion creative industries. We absolutely need to have stronger copyright laws. While we do not yet know what the outcome of the Government’s consultation will be, it is important that we make sure that the right legal protections exist going forward and that they can be enforced.

The initial proposal for an opt-out rather than an opt-in system is simply not fair. As Justine Roberts at Mumsnet said, it is like asking homeowners to defend against burglars. It is not the right way round; the law exists to protect and should do so in this context. We also need to see the licensing agreements between entities, such as Mumsnet and the AI companies that are scraping their data, to protect them. At this moment, Justine Roberts, on behalf of Mumsnet, is suing Open AI in a David and Goliath piece of litigation that she should not have to be doing. I am pro-business and pro-AI, but I am not pro-theft, and we have to put in place the right legislation to stop this.

To be honest, I thought that Sarah Vine might be exaggerating in her column, so I thought that I would play around a little with ChatGPT. I said this morning, “ChatGPT: tell me what Sarah Vine would say about the House of Lords”. This is the answer I got in the voice of AI Sarah: “Yes, it’s a bit mad. Yes, some of them looked like they were embalmed in the Blair years, but I’ll take a sleepy old Lord with a copy of Erskine May over a gobby Back-Bencher on GB News any day. The House of Lords isn’t perfect, but it is our last line of defence against the political toddler tantrum that is modern democracy”. Long may your Lordships grumble, and please let us ensure that we protect this industry.