Artificial Intelligence: Intellectual Property Rights

John Nicolson Excerpts

Wednesday 1st February 2023 Westminster Hall

[John Nicolson (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP)]

Thank you, Mr Robertson. I congratulate the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) on securing the debate.

As I was preparing for the debate, I was thinking about the pace at which artificial intelligence is advancing. All of us, I am sure, have seen news reports these last few weeks of free-to-use artificial intelligence sites being able to muster, at inhuman speeds, reams of error-free text or digital images in response to a simple command from a user. Vain social media users—some of them politicians, perhaps—were asking bots to touch up their profile photos. Students had been asking AIs to write their university essays. So I thought, “Why not?” I asked an AI to write me a speech about the impact of AI on the creative industries.

I discovered that I could tell the AI what tone I wanted for the speech. I was offered a choice of “poet” or “philosopher”. I went for philosopher. The AI got into its stride. “In the past,” it wrote,

“creative tasks, such as writing, editing, and design, were completed by humans, often with the help of specialised software and tools.”

“Humans.” “In the past.” It is almost chilling, Mr Robertson.

My automated pal continued. It was on a creative roll and it wanted to talk about creation. I quote:

“One of the most significant impacts of AI on the creative industry is the potential to automate”

—a split infinitive, you will notice—

“many of the creative tasks that were previously done by humans.”

Back to me again. I am not sure about other hon. Members, but I think creativity without the creative process—without the humans—just seems so soulless. On the upside—this must be music to the ears of some free-market zealots—my AI speechwriter continued:

“This automation of creative tasks can drastically reduce the cost of labour and increase production rates. Not only can AI automate creative tasks,”

it concluded,

“but it can also provide valuable insights and analysis that can help inform the creative process. AI-driven algorithms can analyse large amounts of data and provide insights into customer behaviour, audience trends, and market needs.”

So it seems it is not just creative jobs at risk; AI has already automated tech lobbyists.

Speakers have already focused on the impact of copyright, whether on established geniuses or on musicians who aspire to great careers. Could it be that AI in this context is just a euphemism for automated plagiarism? By its nature and design, AI is derivative. The algorithms driving the AI, and many others, are used to trawl the web, sucking up music, words and images that it reimagines or conflates according to preset guidelines. That all happens in a matter of seconds with little or no regard for copyright and the moral rights of the original creators.

What do we risk losing when we take the human out of humanities, if we fail to safeguard the art and livelihoods or our creators, or if we sacrifice spontaneity for speed? What would become of the poetry of Jackie Kay, the paintings of Alison Watt or the music of Julie Fowlis? Would their art ever have been imagined by the electronic soul of an AI non-being? I think we all know the answer to that.