Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 18th December 2024 Grand Committee

Finally, at the recent All-Party Parliamentary Group for Writers reception, we heard a moving speech by the author Joanne Harris, who made perhaps the most important point. She said that to a lot of the public, as soon as you utter the words “artificial intelligence”, people still think it is science fiction. It is not science fiction. As Joanne Harris and others have pointed out, it is happening now and happening in a big way. The Government need to deal with these concerns both urgently and effectively.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords I have been very impressed by the speeches of my noble friends Lady Kidron and Lord Freyberg, so I will be very brief. I declare in interest as a television producer who produces content. I hope that it has not been scraped up by AI machines, but who knows? I support the amendments in this group.

I know that AI is going to solve many problems in our economy and our society. However, in their chase for the holy grail of promoting AI, I join other noble Lords in asking the Government not to push our creative economy under the bus. It is largely made up of SMEs and single content producers, who do not have the money to pursue powerful AI companies to get paid for the use of their content in training their AI models. It is up to noble Lords to help shape regulations that protect our data and copyright laws and can be fully deployed in the defence of the creative economy.

I too have read the Government’s Copyright and Artificial Intelligence consultation paper, published yesterday. The foreword says:

“The proposals include a mechanism for rights holders to reserve their rights”,


which I, like my noble friend Lady Kidron and others, interpret as meaning that creators’ works can be used by AI developers unless they opt out and require licensing for the use of their work. The Government are following the EU example and going for the opt-out model. I think that the European Union is beginning to realise that it is very difficult to make that work, and it brings an unfairness to content producers. Surely, the presumption should be that AI web crawlers should get agreement before using content. The real problem is that content producers do not even know when their content has been used. Even the AI companies sometimes do not know what content has been used. Surely, the opt-out measure is like having your house raided and then asking the burglar what he has taken.

I call on the Minister to work with us to create an opt-in regime. Creators’ works should be used only when already licensed by the AI companies. The companies say they usually do not use content, only data points. Surely that is like saying to a photographer, “We’ve used 99% of the pixels in a picture but not the whole picture”. If even one pixel is used, the photographer needs to know and be compensated.

The small companies and single content producers of our country are the backbone of our economy, as other noble Lords have said. They are threatened by this technology, in which we have placed so much faith. I ask the Minister to respond favourably to Amendments 204, 205 and 206 to ensure that we have fairness between some of the biggest AI players in the world and the hard-pressed people who create content.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 204, 205 and 206 in the names of my noble friends Lady Kidron and Lord Freyberg, and of the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Clement-Jones, in what rapidly seems to be becoming the Cross-Bench creative club.

I spent 25 years as a professional photographer in London from the late 1980s. When I started, retouchers would retouch negatives and slides by hand, charging £500 an hour. Photoshop stopped that. Professional film labs such as Joe’s Basement and Metro would work 24 hours a day. Snappy Snaps and similar catered for the amateur market. Digital cameras stopped that. Many companies provided art prints, laminating and sundry items for professional portfolios. PDFs and websites stopped that. Many different forms of photography, particularly travel photography, were taken away when picture libraries cornered the market and drove down commissions to unsustainable levels. There were hundreds if not thousands of professional photographers in the country. The smartphone has virtually stopped that.

All these changes were evolution and the result of a world becoming more digitised, but AI web crawlers are different, illegally scraping images without consent or payment then potentially killing the trade of the victim by setting up in competition. This is a parasite, but not in the true sense, because a parasite is careful to keep its victims alive.