Former British deputy PM and Meta apologist Sir Nick Clegg says that forcing AI companies to ask for the permission of copyright holders before using their content would destroy the AI industry overnight.

Clegg, who served as deputy to David Cameron in a Conservative / Lib Dem coalition that governed the UK between 2010 and 2015 before moving to Zuckcorp as president of global policy affairs, told the audience at a literary festival that demands to make tech firms seek consent from creators before using copyrighted material to train AI models were unworkable.

Any such laws would “basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight,” Clegg claimed, according to The Times.

This month, members of the House of Lords, the UK’s upper chamber of Parliament, voted in in favor of amendments to the proposed Data (Use and Access) Bill that would have protected copyrighted work from simply being copied by AI companies.

However, government ministers used an arcane parliamentary procedure to block the amendment, which would have required tech firms to reveal what copyright material has been used to train their models.

Clegg stepped down from his role as president of global affairs at Facebook parent company Meta at the start of this year. He was speaking at the Charleston Festival in East Sussex in order to plug a book he has coming out, How to Save the Internet: the Threat to Global Connection in the Age of AI and Political Conflict.

The former politician seemed confused over the issue of AI and copyright, agreeing when questioned that people ought to be able to opt out of having their work copied and used for model training.

But he then reportedly said that “quite a lot of voices say ‘you can only train on my content, [if you] first ask.’ And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data.” He added: “I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work. And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”

So which is it, Mr Clegg? Do creators have the right to opt out or not? Because asking their permission after the fact is self-defeating. And admitting that the AI business model is dead unless LLM trainers are allowed to break the law doesn’t sound like much of an argument.

That Clegg should side with the UK government and big business interests is probably not surprising considering his background. The Tony Blair Institute, founded by the former Prime Minister, also came out in favor of exceptions to copyright rules for developers training AI models.

This is despite many of the UK’s leading media and arts professionals speaking out against the data access bill, including playwright Tom Stoppard, Dr Who producer Russell T Davies, and a slew of musicians such as Elton John, Paul McCartney, Kate Bush and Robbie Williams.

The big AI companies haven’t been waiting for permission so far, with a recent study finding that OpenAI mined copyright-protected content in order to train its GPT family of models, for example.

Baroness Kidron, who proposed the Lords amendments, said: “How AI is developed and who it benefits are two of the most important questions of our time.” She warned the UK creative industries “must not be sacrificed to the interests of a handful of US tech companies.”

The UK government, for one, has made AI a central plank of its plans for economic revival of the country, as detailed in the AI Opportunities Action Plan published earlier this year. This includes setting up “AI Growth Zones” with streamlined planning processes that allow developers to override both local authorities and the concerns of local communities when siting massive new AI datacenters.

There are alternatives: last month, we reported on a new licensing model that aims to let developers of large language models (LLMs) use copyrighted training data while paying the publishers for the privilege.

It isn’t only the UK where formerly sacrosanct copyright protection is being shredded in favor of AI developers: every nation fears being left behind in some kind of tech arms race. Just recently, it was reported that the head of the US Copyright Office was sacked, just after the agency concluded that AI developers’ use of copyrighted material went beyond existing doctrines of fair use. ®