Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what advice her Department provides to creative industries considering the use of legal recourse when artificial intelligence has been used in breach of copyright.

It would be inappropriate for the Government to provide direct legal advice to individual creators or organisations, but we fully recognise the serious and evolving challenges posed by the use of copyrighted material in AI development.

The current UK Copyright Framework enables creative rights holders to prevent the unauthorised use of protected works, but this can be very difficult to implement in the context of AI, especially for individual firms and creators. We encourage rights holders who believe their work has been used unlawfully to seek independent legal advice.

More broadly, the Government is working to ensure that copyright and intellectual property frameworks remain robust and fit for purpose in the age of AI. We have received over 11,500 responses to our consultation, principally from creators. It is only right that we take the time to read and understand those responses and use them to shape our approach. We have been clear that AI developers must be more transparent about the content they use to train their models and that rights holders should have effective control of their works.

Addressing this is an urgent priority for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, but no decisions will be taken until we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that delivers for the creative industries.