Former Meta Exec: It’s ‘Not Reasonable’ for Artists to Opt Out of AI

Photo Credit: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office / CC by 2.0

Former Meta executive Nick Clegg says that a law requiring tech companies to ask permission to train AI on copyrighted work would ‘kill’ the industry.

Sir Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister and Meta executive, believes making tech companies ask artists’ permission before using their copyrighted material to train AI will “basically kill the AI industry.” The reason? Because AI systems are already training on the vast amounts of data scraped online, without permission. “It’s out there already,” says Clegg.

Those who work in the UK’s creative sector, such as Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney, have urged the government not to “give our work away” to big tech. But Clegg has doubled down on his assertion that artists’ demands that companies ask permission before using their work are “implausible.”

“You can already create art of a sort [using AI], whether it’s a poem, a ditty, an essay, a short story, a picture. You can already do that,” said Clegg.

When asked whether artists should be able to withhold their content from tech companies and their AI models, Clegg admitted he understood the artists’ motivation. “On the one hand, yeah, I think it seems to be 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 modeled. That seems to me to be not unreasonable to opt out.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable in practice, he says. “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 [give permission]. I want out of this,’” he explained. “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.”

Clegg was speaking at the Charleston Festival in East Sussex at an event to promote his book, How to Save the Internet, which is due out in September. He stepped down from his position at Meta as president of global affairs earlier this year, just weeks before Trump’s second term in the White House began.

On Thursday, Parliament heard from both sectors (creative and tech) about whether copyright holders should be able to see when their work had been used to train AI, and by whom. MPs voted 195 to 124, majority 71, against the proposed transparency amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill.

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