Over the second weekend of May, Donald Trump sacked the head of the US Copyright Office. On the previous Friday, the office had released “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 3: Generative AI Training”. For the “tech bros”, who had spent so much on bringing Trump to power, this report was a declaration of war: it cast doubt on the viability of the “fair use” defence, upon which Open AI, Meta and other tech companies rely for the unrestricted right to “scrape” online data when training their models.
Copyright protection is just one of the many issues raised by the advances of AI. Following a government consultation, it is being fiercely debated within the British parliament, specifically between the government, which controls the House of Commons, and the House of Lords.