Don't Mess With The Copyright Laws!

I haven't blogged in a while, but don't you worry, I've been super busy in the background!  

In the meantime I wanted to share the letter I have just sent my local MP about the govenments plans to mess about with the copyright laws.  While progress is important, I think this is unacceptable.  If you agree, please also reach out to your local MP.  Feel free to use this letter as inspiration.

 

Dear Mr Hinds
 
I hope you are well.
I know you are busy with the farmers etc, but I just had to write about the government’s proposal to change the copyright law allowing AI companies to train their models without a licence.
 
There are so many issues with this.
Firstly, just because to create is innately human, and humans will create whether we’re paid to or not, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be paid fairly for our work.
If AI companies are going to make a profit from using other peoples work (and they will) then they should pay to use that work (be it images, text or music) in the first place.
And seeing as big tech companies have a habit of not paying the taxes they owe, I would rather they paid the person for their work first, then at least the money will come into our economy to be spent by people who live and work here.
 
There is also the issue that we have a massive mental health crisis on our hands, especially with our young people.  It is a well known fact that using your hands to make things can reduce anxiety and other issues related to mental health.  If we reduce the number of people who can actually make a living doing creative things because AI is doing it instead, we stop our young people seeing what they could do (you can’t be what you can’t see) and so numbers of people making will drop further, increasing the mental health crisis.  (never mind the loss of heritage crafts along the way)  Asking AI to create a thing for you will not help your mental health!
 
Next is the issue that AI isn’t really sustainable.  It uses a lot of water and power and it seems odd that the government would be encouraging the use of all these resources for the creation of stuff that humans are quite capable of creating themselves.  Especially when we find ourselves in a climate emergency.
Surly it would be better to focus on AI’s which can do things that humans find hard, like spotting the early signs of cancer in scans, allowing our doctors to focus on saving lives ASAP.
I don’t understand how using the creative back catalogue will allow an AI to do this – it just needs to be fed as many scans as possible and told which are the bad ones (probably not quite that simple, but I’m not sure how the entire Elton John back catalogue would help it in this role).
 
I am fully behind the use of AI when it has a useful purpose which will help humanity to survive; we know there are so many wicked problems out there that could use the help.
Human creativity really isn’t something that needs to be fixed right now.  It’s a shame we can’t create an AI to fix human greed.
 
While I am a maker I don’t make for my income, but human creativity is so close to my heart.  When I read a book or listen to music, look at some art or watch stuff on TV, I want to know that is a human story I am engaging in, even if it’s fiction.  I don’t want something hashed together by a computer from all the things it was fed in training but which it has no understanding of.

So lets not mess about with the copyright laws and instead have a think about what we really need AI to do and create a set of regulations for the AI industry which will help it progress while keeping the general public and businesses safe.
 
Thank you for reading.