Copyright and Generative AI

Abstract

This is an opinion piece looking at the UK legal copyright framework, human creativity, generative artificial intelligence, and if you need to get permission from the creators or owners of on-line content such as writing, photos, music and film to scrape their content to build AI systems. There is huge concern in the UK’s economically vital and “soft power” driving creative industries, especially when the AI output competes directly with the very content that is used to make the generative AI tool work in the first place. There are essentially two opposing views and this article presents one side.