A government minster has indicated that new legislation may be needed to address the continuing uncertainty about striking the balance between protecting the copyright of creators and ensuring that AI models can train on sufficiently large data sets which often include works protected by copyright.

Speaking at the Times Tech Summit, Feryal Clark, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for AI and Digital Government, said that the Government was “working through what we need to do to resolve the issue and to bring clarity to both the AI sector [and] also to creative industries”, adding that she expects a solution to be proposed by the end of the year.

Clarity in this area had proved elusive for some time. In his ‘Pro-innovation Regulation of Technologies Review’ in 2023, Sir Patrick Vallance recommended that the Government should “announce a clear policy position on the relationship between intellectual property law and generative AI to provide confidence to innovators and investors”. Having abandoned initial plans to amend the text and data mining exception in s.29A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to allow the use of copyright works to train AI models for commercial purposes, the previous Government sought to respond to Sir Patrick’s recommendations by proposing a code of practice which would be developed by the UKIPO alongside AI developers and representatives of the creative industries. However, this too proved short-lived and the previous Government announced on 6 February 2024 that its plans for a code of practice on copyright and AI had been abandoned.

It will be welcome news to many that the Government has committed to resolve the uncertainty in this area “by the end of this year”, although what form that resolution will take remains to be seen.