YoImagine that someone arrives at a pub in a high-end sports car: a £1.5 million Koenigsegg Regerato choose one at random: park and exit the vehicle. They walk into the pub you’re drinking in and start walking around their customers, sliding their hand into your pocket in plain view, smiling at you as they take out your wallet and empty it of cash and cards.
The not-so-subtle pickpocket stops if you shout and ask what the hell they’re doing. “Sorry for the inconvenience,” says the pickpocket. “It’s an opt-out, my friend.”
It sounds absurd. However, it seems to be the approach the government is taking to appease AI companies. A consultation will be opened soon, the Financial Times reportswhich will allow AI companies to extract content from individuals and organizations unless they explicitly opt out of using their data.
The AI revolution has been as broad as it is rapid. Even if you are not one of the 200 million people Those who log into ChatGPT every week or dabble with its generative AI competitors, such as Claude and Gemini, will no doubt have interacted with an AI system, consciously or unconsciously. But AI fire needs two constantly replenishing sources to survive and not go out. One is energy, which is why artificial intelligence companies are getting into the business of buying nuclear power plants. And the other is the data.
Data is vital to AI systems because it helps them develop copies of how we interact. If AI has any “knowledge” (and that is highly disputed, given that it is actually an elegant pattern matching machine) then it comes from the data it is trained on.
Study predicts that large language models like ChatGPT run out of training data By 2026, your appetite will be just as voracious. However, without that data, the AI revolution may stall. Tech companies know this, and that’s why they’re signing licensing deals for content everywhere. But that introduces friction, and a sector whose unofficial motto for the last decade or more has been “move fast and break things”it doesn’t make friction.
That’s why they’re already trying to push us toward an opt-out approach to copyright, where everything we write, publish and share is destined to become AI training data by default unless we say no, in rather than an opt-in regime, where companies have to ask us to use our data. We can already see how companies are preparing us for this reality: this week, X began notifying users about a change to its terms and conditions of use that would allow all posts to be used for grok trainElon Musk’s AI model designed to compete with ChatGPT. And Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has made a similar change, giving rise to the viral “Goodbye Meta AI” urban legend that supposedly voids legal agreements.
The reason AI companies want an opt-out regime is obvious: if you ask most people if they want something from the books they write or the music they produce, or the posts and photographs they shared on social networks, is used to train AI, they will say no. And then the AI revolution takes off. The reason why governments want to allow such a change in the concept of copyright ownership that has existed for more than 300 yearsand has been enshrined in law by more than 100It’s less obvious. But like many things, it seems it all comes down to money.
The government has faced lobbying from big tech companies who suggest this is a requirement for them to consider the country as a place to invest and share in the spoils of AI innovation. A lobby document written by Google suggested that supporting its approach to a copyright opt-out regime “secure the uk “It can be a competitive place to develop and train AI models in the future.” The government’s discussed formulation of the issue, which already puts the opt-out approach on the table as a method against which to argue, is therefore a big victory for the big tech lobbies.
With the amount of money flowing through the tech sector and the levels of investment going into AI projects, it’s no surprise that Keir Starmer doesn’t want to miss out on the potential reward available. The government would be remiss if it did not consider how to appease tech companies as they develop world-changing technology and try to make the UK an AI powerhouse.
But this is not the answer. Let’s be clear: the UK’s mooted copyright scheme would effectively allow companies to steal our data – every post we make, every book we write, every song we create – with impunity. It would require us to sign up for each individual service and tell them no, we don’t want them to gobble up our data and spit out a poor composite image of us. Potentially hundreds of them, from large technology companies to small research laboratories.
Let’s not forget: OpenAI, a company now valued at more than 150 billion dollars – plans to give up its founding nonprofit principles to become a for-profit company. It has more than enough money in its coffers to pay for training data, rather than relying on charity from the general public. Companies like this can certainly afford to put their hands in their own pockets, rather than ours. So stop playing.