These comments come from The Times, which reported on remarks Clegg gave at the Charleston Festival last week. Around the time Clegg was speaking, the UK Parliament was voting against proposals that would have allowed copyright holders to see when and by whom their work was used. (Meta specifically has already faced lawsuits this year from authors who claim their work was stolen to train the company’s AI.) Clegg opined that proposals such as these were “implausible” because the work is “out there already.”
“On the one hand, yeah, I think it seems to me as a matter of natural justice, to say to people that they should be able to opt out of having their creativity, their products, what they’ve worked on indefinitely modelled. That seems to me to be not unreasonable to opt out,” Clegg said when asked about artists having the right to withhold their work for AI training before offering a hell of a but. “I think the creative community wants to go a step further. Quite a lot of voices say ‘you can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data. I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work. And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight. So, I think people should have clear, easy to use ways of saying, no, I don’t. I want out of this. But I think expecting the industry, technologically or otherwise, to preemptively ask before they even start training — I just don’t see. I’m afraid that just collides with the physics of the technology itself.”
One might read this and conclude that Clegg thinks that paying people fairly for their work and labor stands in the way of the technological progress that gives us things like poorly rendered images of a shrimp Jesus, and that would be something that humanity (or at least tech executives) would be worse off without. You could also read this and think that Clegg’s comments are more or less an admission that AI is so built on free or plagiarized work that the people selling it know that there is effectively no business model without that free work. Either way, Clegg would be an expert; he was on Meta’s board for seven years, before he was replaced by someone who President Trump liked better.
