For the attention of Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Team – Intellectual Property Office
CHEAD welcomes the opportunity to respond to the UK Government’s Intellectual
Property Office’s (IPO) call for evidence on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence.
Executive Summary
CHEAD is supportive of the UK Government’s objective of accelerating economic growth and acknowledges the critical role artificial intelligence (AI) will play in realising this ambition – but only if the UK is committed to fostering responsible AI development.
We urge the UK Government to recognise that as a sector, the cultural and creative industries are already embracing the productivity and creative potential of AI.
While we recognise the UK Government’s ambition to accelerate AI-driven economic growth, this cannot come at the expense of creators. Copyright ownership is the life blood of the sector and any outcome that undermines this, no matter how unintentional, would fundamentally threaten the continued success of our world leading cultural and creative industries, and its ability to support the UK Government’s Plan for Growth. Pursuing changes to existing copyright law will significantly impact the hundreds of thousands of students, freelancers, and small businesses whose livelihoods depend on the UK’s gold standard copyright regime as it currently exists. The proportion of students using generative AI tools has jumped from 53% last year to 88% this year. The proportion of students reporting using any AI tool has jumped from 66% last year to 92% this year (HEPI). AI is present in all undergraduate and post graduate creative disciplines and will be a part of all creative graduate’s practice throughout their working lives.
Following the publication of the ‘AI Opportunities Action Plan’, CHEAD recognises that a variety of artificial intelligence (AI) tools present significant opportunities for the UK’s cultural and creative industries, with many creative educators, organisations and practitioners actively leveraging AI tools to alter workflows, undertake content creation, streamline production processes and personalise audience engagement, among many other things. More broadly, artificial intelligence can be understood as assisting the democratising of creativity, opening opportunities for creators no matter who they are or what experience they have, through access to emerging technologies. While creators and workers in the creative industries have concerns that AI will impact their livelihoods, from roles being made redundant to synthetic works competing with their own, they remain heavily engaged in the development of the technology in the belief that their original works, fuelled by human imagination and creativity will be valued and that they themselves will be fairly remunerated under existing copyright and licencing frameworks. The imbalance between the power dynamic of big tech and the creative community risks undermining incentives for wealth creation for UK PLC, encouragement of the talent pipeline and the creation of new content, which are vital – not only for the success of the development and use of generative AI – but also for the growth of the UK’s cultural and creative industries, which already contribute nearly £125bn annually to the UK economy and employ over 2.3 million people
For these reasons, CHEAD does not support the UK Government’s stated desire to pursue Option 3 the ‘opt out’– a data mining exception which allows rights holders to reserve their rights, underpinned by supporting measures on transparency.
An opt-out regime, as currently conceived in the consultation, is unworkable.
Introducing broad AI training exceptions with opt-outs would fundamentally alter the copyright framework in a way that risks shifting economic value away from creators and towards technology platforms and large tech companies. It would not safeguard the rights and livelihoods of creators.
Under an opt-out regime, the burden of protecting copyrighted works would fall disproportionately on rights holders. This reverses the fundamental premise of copyright law, which grants creators exclusive rights to their work by default.
Dynamic licensing practice, enabling UK creators to benefit from new revenue streams, would be of most benefit to UK rights holders. Internationally, the UK is already recognised as one of the most advanced jurisdictions for licensing, offering tailored licenses for different use scenarios. We must balance innovation with protection. We must safeguard creators rights and mitigate against unregulated data mining and training of large language models without ethical guardrails in place. Deepfakes degrade authentic human creative output, undermine the public’s trust in image creation, original visual authenticity and our cultural and creative identity.
AI companies should be required to pay royalties to the creators of images, text, audio, or video that they use to train AI models. Existing frameworks, i.e. for music, represent how copyright frameworks can operate symbiotically with AI developers. For 110 years PRS for Music has grown and protected the rights of the music creator community, paying out royalties with accuracy, transparency and speed. In 2023, PRS for Music paid out £943.6m in royalties and collected a record £1.08 billion in revenues.
A large proportion of the cultural and creative industries are SMEs, micro businesses or micro-enterprises and freelancers. This includes current and future creative students and graduates working on a project basis and establishing their careers. The introduction of an ‘opt-out’ regime would therefore place a clear and disproportionate administrative and potential legal enforcement burden on organisations of this size, undermining their ability to contribute to the growth of the creative ecosystem as a whole and to pursue an economically viable, financially and morally rewarding sustainable career path.
The worse case scenario would be if UK Government policy legitimises content theft. CHEAD supports the Make it Fair campaign – UK Creative Industries Launch ‘Make it Fair’ Campaign – News Media Association and the Creative Rights in AI Coalition Creative Rights In AI Coalition
Produced with thanks to Creative UK, PRS, HEPI and ACID.
February 2025 Contact Sandra Booth sandra@chead.ac.uk
Director of Policy and External Relations, CHEAD, Council for Higher Education Art and Design.