The UK’s new fund for investing in AI ventures does zero due diligence on whether companies receiving cash use copyrighted work without permission. The revelation comes after a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests by Ed Newton-Rex. Rex is chief executive of ‘Fairly Trained‘, which checks and certifies AI companies’ use of data for training their models.
UK ‘Sovereign AI fund’
In fact, Newton-Rex had to use three FOI requests to praise the admission out of the government. Disgraced former PM Keir Starmer handed the reins of the half-billion pound fund to the daughter-in-law of his idol Tony Blair.
Newton-Rex notes that, at first, the fund claimed it “considered” copyright compliance. However, when he then FOI’d the documents relating to the process, the fund had to admit that it had no such process. Instead, it claimed this is done by the government’s British Business Bank:
I asked what their criteria were when selecting companies to back, particularly regarding copyright. They said “copyright compliance is considered as part of legal execution, including as part of a typical representations, warranties and disclosure process.”
So I asked for the docs they used as part of that “representations, warranties and disclosure process”, so that I could see what they said about copyright. They said they had no such documents, and that the British Business Bank actually carried out the the representations, disclosures and warranties process on their behalf.
But when he asked the Bank for the documentation it uses in that process, it denied doing anything of the sort:
So I asked the British Business Bank for the docs they use in that process. But they replied saying they do no such thing, not for Sov AI or anyone – they let the commercial lead investor sort the reps and warranties.
What does this mean? It means the Sov AI fund is allocating taxpayer money to AI companies without checking whether they train on copyrighted work without permission.
As Newton-Rex pointed out, investing in banks that use copyrighted materials without permission is illegal under UK law:
Why does this matter? Two reasons:
I can’t believe the government would actively want to invest in companies that use the copyrighted work of British creatives without permission. Doing so is (i) illegal in the UK, (ii) possibly illegal elsewhere, and (iii) clearly antithetical to protecting its citizens and treating them fairly.
There are already signs that companies Sov AI has backed may be planning to do exactly this – e.g. Cosine, which has publicly said it plans to train on datasets that are known to contain copyrighted work.
If Sov AI is going to continue investing UK taxpayers’ money in AI companies, it is imperative that it introduces simple due diligence into whether companies exploit creatives’ work without permission. This would involve virtually no additional overhead, and would help ensure their investments align with the interests of the British public.
Lawless AI
The revelations come as the AI industry has been exposed as buying up huge numbers of irreplaceable rare books, then destroying them after scanning in order to monopolise their information. It comes as the UK government continues to massively expand AI-driven facial recognition around the country with no mandate to do so. And as the US and Israel use AI to drive the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians.
It also comes as experts warn that AI-triggered economic collapse is inevitable if AI companies continue behaving as they have been. There is no sign of change — and no sign that the UK government is even interested in trying to rein in their excesses and abuses.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
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