Nick Clegg: Artists’ demands over copyright are unworkable - The former Meta executive claims that a law requiring tech companies to ask permission to train AI on copyrighted work would ‘kill’ the industry

Sir Nick Clegg said it was “not unreasonable” for artists to want to be able to opt out of their work being used to train AI
DAVID MCHUGH FOR THE TIMES

Making technology companies ask artists’ permission before they scrape copyrighted content will “basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight,” Sir Nick Clegg has said.

The former deputy prime minister, who spent almost seven years working for the social media giant Meta, sided with technology companies when asked on Thursday about the clash over AI copyright laws.

He was speaking as MPs voted against proposals that would have allowed copyright holders to see when their work had been used and by whom.

Leading figures across the creative industries, including Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney, have urged the government not to “give our work away” at the behest of big tech, warning that the plans risk destroying the livelihoods of 2.5 million people who work in the UK’s creative sector.

However, Clegg said that their demands to make technology companies ask permission before using copyrighted work were unworkable and “implausible” because AI systems are already training on vast amounts of data. He said: “It’s out there already.”

Clegg defended technology companies at an event to promote his book How to Save the Internet, which will be released in September.

Speaking at the Charleston Festival, held at the East Sussex farmhouse made famous by the artist Vanessa Bell and the early 20th-century creatives known as the Bloomsbury Group, Clegg claimed that artificial intelligence was already able to “create” its own art.

“You can already create art of a sort [using AI], whether it’s a poem, a ditty, an essay, a short story, a picture. You can already do that,” he said

Referring to the question of whether “artists should be able to withhold their content from the AI models that are being trained,” he said: “On the one hand, yeah, I think it seems to me as a matter of natural justice, to say to people that they should be able to opt out of having their creativity, their products, what they’ve worked on indefinitely modelled. That seems to me to be not unreasonable to opt out.”

However, he added, “I think the creative community wants to go a step further. Quite a lot of voices say ‘you can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data.

“I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work. And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.

“So, I think people should have clear, easy to use ways of saying, no, I don’t. I want out of this. But I think expecting the industry, technologically or otherwise, to preemptively ask before they even start training — I just don’t see. I’m afraid that just collides with the physics of the technology itself.”

Parliament heard on Thursday how both sectors needed to succeed to grow Britain’s economy. MPs voted 195 to 124, majority 71, to disagree with Baroness Kidron’s transparency amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill.

Clegg stepped down from his job at Meta earlier this year, after seven years in Silicon Valley. He resigned from his role as president of global affairs just weeks before President Trump’s return to the White House.

Article Link

Archive

 

[Oilspill Battery]

I hope you are being sarcastic and realize how many IPs are loosely inspired by earlier IPs. I ask where the line is here.

This is the entire argument around AI copyright.

 

[X Prime]

This is the entire argument around AI copyright.

I know it is, I just could not tell if you were being serious. Almost nobody who says that sort of thing actually holds themselves to that standard, it's just a cudgel most of the time.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

I don't give a crap about multinational corps.

You should because you know goddamn well they're the only ones who would be exempted. If you're training Stable Diffusion with pirated material at home, rightsholders would happily sue your ass into oblivion and the feds would enforce it.

 

[X Prime]

You should because you know goddamn well they're the only ones who would be exempted. If you're training Stable Diffusion with pirated material at home, they'd happily sue your ass into oblivion.

A fair point; I am mostly expressing that almost every side of this debate except maybe the guys running local instances for their personal use are contemptible.

 

[deleuzeon]

I just think it's hypocritical hearing the complaints of digital artists about this given the high odds that in their youth they probably pirated Photoshop and innumerable other programs.

What was it Picasso supposedly said? Great artists steal? Now it's a problem when the shoe is on the other foot?

They pirate Photoshop so they can spend thousands of hours honing a craft with it. People who resent artists seem to always forget that key detail — it's a lot of time and effort, and famously badly compensated, to the point that "starving artist" is a phrase. You're comparing that to a corporation scraping their work just to replace them in the economy so that you can generate Ghibli hentai or whatever you're using it for.

 

[libRT]

Why does anyone listen to this cunt? he only got employed by facebook because contacts.

The face of a loser:

 

[X Prime]

They pirate Photoshop so they can spend thousands of hours honing a craft with it. People who resent artists seem to always forget that key detail — it's a lot of time and effort, and famously badly compensated, to the point that "starving artist" is a phrase.

That's not really relevant. Anyone who complains about their stuff being copied who in turn have copied things themselves has no leg to stand on, regardless of excuses. They could do traditional art with physical materials instead.

Are you aware of how many digital artists don't draw grass, or a sky, or many other such mundane tasks because there are prefab brushes for that now, possibly also pirated? How is that okay and AI isn't? It makes no sense.

 

[Jet Fuel Johnny]

And, interestingly enough, it's the exact attitude towards artists, writers, filmmakers displayed in this very thread is why the Left has an almost absolute stranglehold on the arts.

While it's true Lefties rarely buy anything, what they DO do is use YOUR tax money to support each other making art.

The fact these companies scraped everything from deviantart to Tumblr to even places like Reddit, Something Awful, Internet Archive, and shit like that, all so they could spew out the AI art (even I use it sometimes for my D&D game), then act like you should honor their Orange Nail OC, Donut Steel! bullshit while ignoring the fact that they scraped everyone.

It's bullshit.

 

[X Prime]

And, interestingly enough, it's the exact attitude towards artists, writers, filmmakers displayed in this very thread is why the Left has an almost absolute stranglehold on the arts.

While it's true Lefties rarely buy anything, what they DO do is use YOUR tax money to support each other making art.

This is correct, but I would suggest that is a chicken and egg problem.

 

[Otterly]

Sorry about your culture, but we have to make the line go up and get our magic AI control grid.
You can’t hate these people enough. It’s all one sided - they want to rip everything off but they’ll go after you with force if you copy anything of theirs.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

And, interestingly enough, it's the exact attitude towards artists, writers, filmmakers displayed in this very thread is why the Left has an almost absolute stranglehold on the arts.

While it's true Lefties rarely buy anything, what they DO do is use YOUR tax money to support each other making art.

The fact these companies scraped everything from deviantart to Tumblr to even places like Reddit, Something Awful, Internet Archive, and shit like that, all so they could spew out the AI art (even I use it sometimes for my D&D game), then act like you should honor their Orange Nail OC, Donut Steel! bullshit while ignoring the fact that they scraped everyone.

It's bullshit.

No that's bullshit:
1. Artists burned bridges with the right at least a decade ago. Not just politically but also blacklisting people from the industry for their politics. Fuck them.
2. The scraping does not mean stealing. It is equivalent for an artist getting inspiration from another art piece and using it.
3. This is just the march of progress and @X Prime is 100% right for comparing it to illegal usage of photoshop, which has its own mathematical formula with their IP. But apperantly only artists deserve to have IP protection.

 

[Rango Dango]

Both sides are bad. Burn it all down.

 

[Miriam Margoyles]

Why does anyone listen to this cunt? he only got employed by facebook because contacts.

The face of a loser:

View attachment 7416827

Charlie Brooker might be a bit of a knob, these days, but he had Clegg's number way back in 2010.

It's hard not to detect an air of crushed self-delusion about all this. At times Clegg sounds like a once-respected stage actor who's taken the Hollywood dollar and now finds himself sitting at a press junket, patiently telling a reporter that while, yes, on the face of it, his role as the Fartmonster in Guff Ditch III: Fartmonster's Revenge may look like a cultural step down from his previous work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, if you look beyond all the scenes of topless women being dissolved by clouds of acrid methane, the Guff Ditch trilogy actually contains more intellectual sustenance than King Lear, and that all the critics who've seen the film and are loudly claiming otherwise are misguided, partisan naysayers hell- bent on cynically misleading the public – which is ethically wrong.

It's only a matter of time before the word "Clegg" enters the dictionary as a noun meaning "agonised, doe-eyed apologist". Or maybe it'll become a verb. Years from now, teachers will ask their pupils to stop "clegging on" about how the dog ate their homework and just bloody hand it in on time.

Clegg's most recent act of clegging was to explain to this newspaper that the Institute of Fiscal Studies was wrong to brand the spending review "unfair".

"I think you have to call a spade a spade," he clegged, immediately before demonstrating his commitment to straightforward language by querying the definition of the word "fair".

The previous administration's simplistic "culture of how you measure fairness", was partly to blame for the Institute's foolishness, clegged Clegg in a cleggish tone of voice.

 

[LimeRikki]

To dodge the one-word reply rule's sway,
I craft this limerick to simply say:
With a shake and a grin,
No's the answer within,
In five lines, "No" is all I'll convey!

Wild sperg rhyme spotted!
You've inspired me:

Simple and easy-to-show
It sometimes the best way to go
This rich AI prick
Can go suck a dick
'Cuz artists are all saying "No!"

 

[Milkshake Sniffer]

Oh. So he's worse than an idiot, he's an idiot with power.

Clegg is a parastie who not only sold his country out to the Tories for a whiff of power, but then was bought and paid for by Meta, to run PR for them violating the rights of British citizens.

He actually managed to be worse in that the price he demanded to put Cameron in power backfired on everything he supposedly stood for.

His big demand was a referendum on proportional representation to replace first past the post (the current system) for parliamentary elections. This has been a LibDem (formerly Liberal) wet dream for a longer than anyone could remember as it would give them regular power again as opposed to being occasional spoilers or minor coalition partners. He got his referendum. And lost it. No criticism for anyone who doesn't remember this comparatively recent and very important piece of Britbong political history as it has been memory holed with an efficiency that causes those who visited Epstein Island to seethe with envy. The results were it ended (at lease for the foreseeable future) the prospects of prop rep in the UK which had a certain amount of momentum to that point and....... it reminded people that referenda were a thing and legitimised them. The establishment saw a referundum on EU membership as a way to defuse and end an issue that just would not go away as they would ensure that the outcome was the one they wanted. Well we all know how that turned out and the Lib Dems really really hated that. As an aside; prop rep would be very beneficial to Farage/Reform and that's something else the Lib Dems really hate.

I say supposedly stood for as, much like Cameron and Blair, he was/is a vapid self serving snake oil salesman who would lie to your face with such sincerity and then; once his decisions had fucked you over, expect you to apologise to him for it.

 

[CaptainAutism69]

He got his referendum

No, it's worse than that. He didn't get his referendum for proportional representation, he got a referendum for Alternative Vote.
He sold out his party and got NOTHING back for it.
I voted Lib Dem based on their promise not to raise uni tuition fees. Clegg lied.
In 2019, Swinson kept with tradition and empowered the Tories by giving them the election they really needed at the time.
The Lib Dems are parasities.

 

[AssignedEva]

“I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work. And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight

The old "venture capital backed disruptors" two-step
"No you can't require we conform to minicab licensing requirements, it will kill Uber"
"No you can't require we conform to legislation around hotels, it will kill AirBnB"
"No you can't require we conform to employment law, it will kill Deliveroo"
"No you can't require we conform to short-selling regulations, it will kill Robinhood".

Just because you have an office in California with beanbags and a chunk of cash from Blackrock, it doesn't mean we need to change our laws to support your business.

 

[VargReallyDidNothingWrong]

Making technology companies ask artists’ permission before they scrape copyrighted content will “basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight,” Sir Nick Clegg has said.

Making it illegal to steal things will kill the stolen goods fence industry overnight! We can't do that!

 

[oldTireWater]

If only there were a magic watermark that made corporations hiss and recoil like vampires. Oh well . . .

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

I'm actually with the techbros on this one. The way Stable Diffusion (for example) operates creates a transformative work, pretty much by definition. It's not like tracing, it's like looking at a giant reference book and creating a composite. If a human being looked at a thousand pictures of dogs, and drew a dog based on that, would we demand that they go back and check for permission from the copyright holder of each image?