UK Government's AI Plans Smacked Down by the House of Lords
Can't believe I'm in agreement with the bigwigs in Westminster.
The House of Lords rejects virtually all of the UK government’s prior plans on AI legislation.
The 2025 public consultation led to over 11,500 responses. Well done!
A greater need for tighter regulation, transparency, and sovereign AI development.
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Hello one and all, and welcome back to AI and Games. This week I would typically be out in San Francisco for GDC. But frankly I’m so busy I really couldn’t afford losing another week out of the office having just been at the Gamescom Dev Leadership Summit last month. So here I am writing away. For those of you out there at GDC this week, I hope you’re having a great time, and this will no doubt help explain why you haven’t seen me tromping through the Yerba Buena gardens!
But of course for this week’s edition, I didn’t make life easy for myself. I decided to spend a good chunk of my Sunday reading through the recent report from the UK government’s House of Lords on the state of AI in the creative industries. A topic that has loomed in Ol’Blighty for quite some time now.
But dare I say it, it’s far more optimistic than I expected. Read on!
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Unpacking the House of Lords Report on AI and Creative Industries
With the UK’s acting government having been in power close to two years now, there’s been very little positive movement in legislation towards AI. As the government continues to push forward with initiatives that are largely disliked by the general public, we have the latest report on the issue from the House of Lords. This 85-page banger not only calls out the naivety of the current plans of the Labour government, but they largely fall in line with public opinion.
See this is why you subscribe and support us. You need someone willing to spend a lazy Sunday burning through coffee and reading through government reports.
A Quick Recap
As we’ve reported over the past year or so, the government had made a number of suggestions as to have to move forward, many of which aligning with big tech and giving them access to the copyrighted material without oversight. These suggestions then framed a public consultation on the issue that was launched over a year ago, which advocated for providing an opt-out system, whereby major AI players could scrape data by default, and allow for the training of (generative) AI models without consent of IP holders and citizens lest they explicitly stated otherwise.
It took the government almost a year to respond after more than 11,500 responses were sent responding to this issue - by comparison a previous consultation in 2024 on generative AI and data protection laws received less than 250. Published in December of last year, It was reported that 88% of submissions supported mandatory AI licensing, and that having a proper regulation on the protection of copyright and IP, alongside transparency in data, was the way forward. Meanwhile the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic continued to lobby the government and pushed for all of this to be resolved as soon as possible.
Since the consultation closed in February of last year, the government has been working to push forward with its initiatives, albeit with a bit of a reset given the overwhelming consensus on AI licensing, but also a change of minister in charge. Having spent just over a year in office Peter Kyle MP moved from his position as Secretary of State for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), and moved into a new role as Business Secretary. It was news I welcomed at the time, given Kyle had shown zero effort to actually engage with the creative industries, yet had numerous meetings with virtually every major player in AI. Perhaps unsurprising that his opinions seemed a little skewed towards screwing over IP holders in pursuit of sunny uplands.
However it’s not been all that rosy since. Liz Kendall MP took over the role in September with an intent to focus more on safe regulation in AI, including challenges issues around deepfakes - something that is long overdue. That said, the DSIT has had little to say on where they’re going to go next with AI and copyright. They’ve since said after the overwhelmingly negative response that "they have no preferred option.” Meanwhile, Kendall has had to continue to put out fires due to not only the disastrously conceived and implemented Online Safety Act, plus the government’s embarrassing ‘free AI training’ imitative in January. Including a bunch of generic, rather uninformative and low-value courses, many of which offered by the very big tech companies who are not interested in actually teaching you about the real issues that AI introduces.
AI, Copyright and the Creative Industry (4th Report)
This brings us to last week, where the House of Lords published their 4th report on “AI, Copyright and the Creative Industries”, responding to the current stance that the UK government has on its proposed legislation.
For anyone outside of the UK, our government operates in two houses: the House of Commons, and the House of Lords. The former is responsible for passing legislation and authorising taxes and expenditure, but is held accountable by the latter. The House of Lords conducts investigations and reports on legislation the government wants to enshrine in law. It’s far from a perfect system, but it has its merits sometimes.
In summary, it’s pretty damning. The House of Lords calls out the previously advertised plans of the government as means to “drift towards tacit acceptance of large-scale, unlicensed use of creative content”. With any gains being made from this arrangement being given “to a small number of US-based firms while harms to UK creators grow.”
Yeah, they did not mince their words.
The house has made six suggestions on where the government should go next. Amongst those we find the following:
Setting out clear guidance on AI and copyright that will remove rights for companies scrape data in an opt-out model.
Set out protections both for ‘deepfakes’ and digital clones, but also necessary transparency obligations for training AI models.
Establish a market for licensing UK IP for AI companies should they wish to use it, and work to prioritise development of UK-based AI models.
There’s a lot more to cover here, so I want to start by looking at their thoughts on copyright and training issues in an age of Generative AI.
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