Opt out or get scraped: UK’s AI copyright shakeup has Elton John, Dua Lipa fighting back

Celebrity musicians from Elton John to Dua Lipa are urging the U.K. government to rethink controversial plans to reform copyright laws that allow artificial intelligence developers access to rights-protected content.

An open letter signed by John, Lipa and a host of other high-profile artists, this weekend called on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to back an amendment proposed by U.K. lawmaker Beeban Kidron to make the legal framework around AI model makers' use of copyrighted content more strict.

"We are wealth creators, we reflect and promote the national stories, we are the innovators of the future, and AI needs us as much as it needs energy and computer skills," they said in the letter.

"We will lose an immense growth opportunity if we give our work away at the behest of a handful of powerful overseas tech companies."

Late last year, the U.K. government kicked off a consultation on proposals that would give tech giants and AI labs like OpenAI a legally sound way of using copyrighted content to train their advanced foundational models.

Under the proposals, artists would have to opt out of having their copyright-protected works from being scraped by large language models. LLMs like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini rely on huge amounts of data to generate humanlike responses in the form of text, images, video and audio.

This led to concerns from the U.K.'s creative industries, as it would mean placing the onus on content creators to request not to have their data used for the training of AI models — which, they argue, would amount to giving their valuable work away.

The open letter published on Saturday calls on the government to embrace an amendment put forward by Beeban Kidron, a lawmaker in the upper house of U.K. Parliament.

The amendment would require tech giants and AI labs to tell copyright owners which individual works they have used to train their AI models — and, according to the letter, "put transparency at the heart of the copyright regime and allow both AI developers and creators to develop licensing regimes that will allow for human-created content well into the future."

"To parliamentarians on all sides of the political spectrum and in both Houses, we urge you to vote in support of the UK creative industries," the letter reads. "Supporting us supports the creators of the future. Our work is not yours to give away."

The U.K.'s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.