Take action to protect your works – the AOI AI Survey
In late 2024 the UK Government issued the Copyright and Artificial Intelligence consultation.
This consultation has a preferred option from Government which is an exception to copyright* would allow AI developers to scrape the internet (called text and data mining) of all content, including your illustrations, and use for training their generative AI systems. Online platforms generative AI platforms trained this way can create images from a written prompt inputted by a user.
The Government are claiming that an ‘opt out’ of the right for companies to scrape our work would ensure creators could say ‘no’ to scraping and then potentially licence their work to AI companies should they wish to. We do not believe this could be a workable solution.
The Government offer four Options (0-3) in the consultation (B.4 Policy options), and we consider that option 1 is the preferred option (and we will be arguing for the inclusion of transparency requirements from generative AI companies over which images have been sourced and included in their datasets)
*An exception to copyright allows for your work to be reproduced without your specific permission. There currently exists a UK text and data mining exception to copyright, but it is for non-commercial, research purposes only.
Take our illustrator survey
Please take part in our short survey here by Friday 31 January 2025to help support our response.
Share with fellow illustrators. You don’t need to be an AOI Member to fill this survey.
Let your MP know
This is an important moment to push back on the proposed exception + opt out, and an effective way of doing this is to write to your MP about the consultation.
This is simple to do via the Creative Rights in AI Coalition template letter that finds your MP for you and allows you to send an email directly to them. You can add your own text as a creator or send the wording as it is. Go here for the letter template.
More informative links: Artificial Intelligence (AI) updates
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