By Robert Booth
Publication Date: 2025-11-23 16:00:00
Technology Minister Liz Kendall has expressed her understanding of artists’ calls not to have their copyrighted works removed by AI companies without payment, saying she wants to “restart” the debate.
In remarks suggesting a change of approach from her predecessor, Peter Kyle, who had hoped to require artists to actively opt out of having their work ingested by generative AI systems, she said: “People rightly want to be paid for the work they do” and “we need to find a way for both sectors to grow and thrive in the future”.
The government has been consulting on a new intellectual property framework for AI, which, in the case of the most common large language models (LLMs), requires large amounts of training data to work effectively.
The issue has sparked passionate protests from some of Britain’s most famous artists. This month, Paul McCartney released a silent two-minute, 45-second track of an empty studio on an album protesting copyright infringement by…
