I appreciate addressing my concern yesterday, and confirming that the UK government won't upend copyright law without an effective rights reservation (i.e. opt-out) system actually existing.
But the problems with opt-out schemes cannot just be solved by putting smart people on the case. They are inherent and likely insurmountable. And IMO this means the government's consultation on changing the law shouldn't have started until a viable opt-out mechanism was proposed.
The technical problems are huge. URL-based opt-out schemes give you no control over downstream copies; opt-out metadata can be removed; automatic content recognition isn't up to the task. People have tried to build better opt-out systems than robots.txt, but none are remotely effective enough for rights holders, as the government has conceded.
It is in AI companies' interests to solve these problems, and they are trying. But there is good reason to think they are insoluble.
And, even if the technical challenges were somehow solved, it would still not solve the awareness gap. 2 years after the start of the modern generative AI era, 60% of artists still haven't even *heard of* robots.txt - the most widely-used opt-out scheme - let alone used it. (It's worth remembering we in fact already have an effective rights reservation system - copyright. It vests automatically in the UK. Adding a second scheme to protect your rights, one that requires action on the part of the creator, will inevitably have low take-up.)
And beyond that, what does reserving your rights even mean in a world in which AI companies, having already trained their models on your work, don't immediately retire or retrain these models when you opt out, but instead leave them live for months or even years?
I believe Sir Chris is genuine in his optimism that smart people can solve the rights reservation problem. But I think he is mistaken. There are clearly huge issues with opt-out schemes, both technical and related to fairness, which no one has come close to solving.
The government should not be consulting on changing the law until / unless it has an opt-out mechanism to propose, so that the degree to which it solves these huge outstanding issues can be evaluated.
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