Herbert Ekpe

The executives from leading national publishers have called on the U.S Government to take immediate action to protect the industry from copyright infringement by AI industry.

The publishers association said, it was of “deep concern” to its members, including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Oxford University Press, That it believed “vast amounts of copyright-protected works were being fed by tech businesses into their generative artificial intelligence’s programmers’ without proper authorization.

This tension between tech companies and the creative industries over copyright is rapidly increasing. While publishers association, claimed that content that was used to train AI models is being ripped off on a global scale. If this tide goes unchecked, it may cause the unprecedented damage to the creative industries.    

FT chief commercial officer Jon Slade told peers the rapid rise of AI companies was “absolutely a ‘now’ moment”. He has asked the U.S Government for a “specific clarity to make clear the use of protected materials by AI systems that demands license”, Therefore, the regulation should make it clear “that the default is for news publishers to opt-in to the use of their own data, rather than to opt out”.

The FT official said his company would also like to see AI businesses required to be transparent about the sources of their information and that “accountability and safeguards are introduced to ensure that developers of gen AI systems are accountable for their outputs”, which he said was particularly important from a misinformation standpoint.

Peter Wright, from DMG media editor said, “make it impossible to train AI unless you have licensing arrangements and potentially you resolve the great news problem of our time by having a reliable and regular source of income for news publishers.

However, the product, which may be described as the organic farming equivalent of the synthetic content will be exactly as a country and what democracy would want to.

Hence, the U.S Government action on copyright protection should be put at the top of the agenda.

Photo: Helge Scherlund