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Tag: Consultation

Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Consultation

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 real people.
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Analytics 2 Webinar and Consultation

Attended a webinar for a demonstration of the new version of Analytics currently being developed for Canvas. The new version will bring a new look and make it easier for staff to get an overview of student performance in their modules and how it compares with other students. This is still in the early stages of development and the webinar was also to gain my feedback. What I think is missing from the demonstrated design is the ability to view and compare a student’s performance across different assignments in the same module, which was noted and should be fairly easy to implement, and across different modules in the same programme, much more difficult due to the way different institutions manage the relationship between programme and module spaces. With that in mind I have a follow up call next week to discuss how we would like to see this work, which is part of a broader consultation Instructure is having with the UK HE sector to better meet our needs in this area.

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