The art of shooting oneself in the foot. Nick Clegg, former British Deputy Prime Minister (and ex-Meta employee), has rushed to the aid of the AI industry, which is being threatened with death by artists, no less. Across the Channel, debate is currently raging around a bill that, if passed as it stands, would give companies a blank check to train their AIs with copyright-protected works.
The art of plundering with impunity
Artists will be able to refuse the exploitation of their works, but only after the fact, once the damage has been done. Many artists, authors, and singers have taken to the streets in recent months to protest what could be described as systematic appropriation. To the benefit of a handful of companies only too happy to harvest quality content to train AI models without paying the authors.
A guest at the Charleston festival, Nick Clegg, who recently left Meta after 7 years at the social media giant, claimed that the artists' demands were "unworkable." The latter, foremost among them Elton John and Paul McCartney, are demanding that companies ask for their consent before using their works.
Clegg admits that it is "a matter of natural justice to tell people that they should be able to refuse to have their creativity, their products, what they have worked on modeled indefinitely." But to those "voices that say 'you can only use my content for training if you ask first'," he replies: "I have to say that seems somewhat impractical to me because these systems are training on enormous amounts of data." The implication: the works in question have already been swallowed and digested.
"I think expecting the industry, technologically or otherwise, to preemptively ask before you even start training—I don't see it," he says. He goes on to argue that if everyone had to be asked for consent before harvesting data in the UK and not elsewhere, then "you would essentially kill the AI industry in this country overnight."
An argument that risks falling flat. Because despite its meteoric growth, the AI industry continues to arouse mistrust, between the opacity of its models and widespread plundering. And faced with a cultural sector that employs 2.4 million people in the United Kingdom, it's difficult to portray a handful of extremely wealthy AI companies as victims.
Source: The Times
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