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Category: 2025

Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Consultation

Published 10th February 2025
Funny meme showing DeepSeek as a cat, stealing OpenAI's fish, which is stolen data
A gratuitously stolen meme from Reddit. Oh, the irony! The hypocrisy!

The UK government are currently running an open consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence, and have outlined their preferred solution to “include a mechanism for right holders to reserve their rights, enabling them to license and be paid for the use of their work in AI training” and to introduce “an exception [into copyright law] to support use at scale of a wide range of material by AI developers where rights have not been reserved.”

The main issue I have with this proposal is that it does nothing to respond to the wholesale copyright theft which the tech industry has already conducted. Additionally, it firmly places the emphasis on individual creators for protecting their copyright, when the bleak reality is that it is already the case that individuals have no practical means of redress against multinational mega corporations like Meta, OpenAI and DeepSeek*, who openly admit to copyright theft to train their large language models. I would much prefer that the government spent its efforts towards enforcing existing laws in order to protect the livelihoods of artists, authors and creators, rather than appeasing the tech industry.

But that’s just my opinion. If you have your own thoughts on the matter, you can read the full proposal on the gov.uk website and complete the consultation online. Like every government consultation I’ve ever engaged with, it’s dense, complicated, and time consuming. Almost like it was designed to be off-putting and to lead to a foregone conclusion. I was guided in my submission by the work of the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society.

As well as seeking individual responses, organisations are also invited to respond to the consultation as collective bodies. ALT are doing so behalf of the learning technology community, and are asking for feedback to them by the 18th of February, with the consultation closing a week later on the 25th.

* My compliments to DeepSeek on training their AI model on OpenAI’s AI model, then releasing it as open AI, which OpenAI is not, something which has irked them greatly, and for that alone they are worthy of praise.

AI Disclaimer: There is no ethical use of generative artificial intelligence. The environmental cost is devastating and the technology is built on plagiarised content and stolen art, for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering and replacing the work of real people.
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AI and Assessment Workshop

Published 22nd January 2025
Perplexity AI User Interface
Screenshot of Perplexity search options

Today I attended one of our own AI and Assessment Workshops to see what advice and guidance we are giving to academics and what their feelings and needs are around this topic. This is a new run of sessions which we have just started, and has been organised by one of our academics working on the topic alongside a member of my team.

Despite having published staff and student guidance documents and a dedicated SharePoint space to collate resources and our response, I found from conversing with staff at this event that there is still a prevailing feeling of lacking steer and direction. People were telling me they don’t know what tools it’s safe to use, or what students should be told to avoid. We also had a lot of people from the Library Service today, which is perhaps also indicative of the need for firmer student guidance.

I was pleased to note that there is some good practice filtering through too, such as using a quiz based declaration of use which students have to complete before unlocking their assignment submission link. We talked about adding this to our Canvas module template for next academic year, that’s something one of the academics suggested to us. On the other hand, I found people were still talking in terms of ChatGPT ‘knowing’ things, which is troubling because of the implication that these systems are more than they actually are.

While much of the session took the form of a guided dialogue, my colleague was also providing a hand’s on demo of various systems, including Perplexity which people liked for providing links out to the sources it had used (sometimes, not always), the ability to restrict answers to data from specific sources, such as ‘academic’, but noted a very US bias in the results, a consequence of the training data which has gone into these models. I was quite impressed when I tried to ‘break’ the model with leading prompts and it didn’t indulge me.

A new tool to me was Visual Electric, an image generation site aimed at producing high quality photo-like images. I have thoughts on some of their marketing… But I’m going to try and be more positive when writing about this topic, as I find it very easy to go into a rant! So instead of doing that, I have added a short disclaimer to the bottom of this post, which I’m also going to add to future posts which I write about AI.

AI Disclaimer: There is no ethical use of generative artificial intelligence. The environmental cost is devastating and the technology is built on plagiarised content and stolen art, for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering and replacing the work of real people.
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