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Tag: Government

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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It’s Not Easy Being Green

Published 9th November 2015

Possibly a first today, I read a government paper. Specifically, if you haven’t been able to guess, Jo Johnson’s green paper on the future of HE (a good overview can be found on THE’s website here). It has some good in it, but also a lot that worries me, and of course there is no question of anything that undermines the ideology of market good, public bad.

The big thing in the paper is the new Teaching Excellence Framework of course, something I think is basically a good idea, but it will succeed or fail on how good and useful it is, and on how difficult it is for universities to complete; qualitative measures are notoriously difficult to define and measure. The paper promises that the TEF will not be an administrative burden, which sounds to me like it is going to rely on reductive measures that will be taken to infer teaching quality, and I’m not sure that there’s a lot of value in that.

The expansion of private provision and speeding-up of degree awarding powers is the most worrying part of the paper for me. This has been tried in FE and it has not being going particularly well, with huge amounts of public money disappearing into the profits of private companies with very little student benefit. It’s going back to the underlying ideology of the government which believes that private is always good and public always bad, and all evidence to the contrary be damned. I welcome the acknowledgement of the need for exit measures of some kind in case of a course being withdrawn or the failure of an institution, but this area of the paper is extremely light on detail. A transfer to a similar course at another institution is fine, but I think there needs to be additional financial support available if someone has to relocate or travel so that the student is not left worse off, and the suggestion of a mere refund of fees paid if there is no transfer option is grossly insufficient, as the withdrawal of a course can have a devastating effect on someone’s life and career plans. I think this needs to be acknowledged and appropriate compensation offered in addition to a refund.

The best thing in the paper is the shake-up of the degree classification system with the introduction of a complimentary GPA. I kind of like the traditional honours degree classifications, but there is no question that they have lost a lot of value when 70% of students get either a First or an Upper Second, so I like that the GPA is being introduced as a supplement rather than a replacement.

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