Google has renewed its campaign for ministers to relax AI copyright laws, claiming a failure to do so will harm the economy.
The tech giant has urged the Government to change the law so that start-ups in fields such as fintech or bioscience can scrape the web’s free trove of data to “train” their AI applications, known as large language models (LLMs).
“When any company is building a data centre here, or indeed building an AI company here, the moment they want to train those LLMs, they have to go to a different jurisdiction,” said Katie O’Donovan, Google’s UK head of public policy.
This “puts a ceiling on the sophistication of our [British] AI economy … That investment, that capacity, goes elsewhere”.
She added: “You start to think, increasingly, about how does the UK want to have an AI economy, in this quite competitive global environment?”
While couched as a recommendation to support the broader AI economy, the changes sought would benefit Google, which has a substantial AI business.
Google’s renewed public pressure comes after the Government in March abandoned its latest attempt to find a way to allow technology giants to scrape the web to develop their AI products, following a backlash from artists, writers and musicians.
The training process involves AI companies harvesting publicly available data from the web, which are used to programme the model. This can include material protected by copyright.
The cultural industries have strongly resisted the big-tech companies’ push for unfettered access to the web, saying this contravenes their rights as creators of the material.
The Government initially proposed that artists could “opt out” of having their work included in AI training. But the sector campaigned against this, drawing in high-profile figures such as Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Elton John.
Ministers then suggested that tech firms could continue using copyrighted material to develop their bots, but only for scientific or research purposes. If a firm then used its AI for a commercial purpose, it would have to seek a licence from rights-holders.
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