A proposed overhaul of copyright law risks “running roughshod” over a British design industry that has created such memorable products as the red phone box, the London underground map and the iPhone, according to a group of leading UK designers.
In a letter to the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, 35 UK-based designers have urged the government to change cours on its plans to let artificial intelligence (AI) companies train their models on copyrighted work without permission. The proposal has already prompted fierce criticism from the worlds of publishing, music, film, TV and the performing arts, with leading creative figures including Sir Paul McCartney, Richard Osman and Kate Bush voicing their opposition.
The letter’s signatories include some of the biggest names in British product and furniture design, including Sebastian Conran, Jasper Morrison, Tomoko Azumi and Tom Dixon. They ask Kyle to protect a sector that has “contributed significantly to the nation’s wealth, to the nation’s reputation, to inward investment and to global trade”.
Morrison has been described as “one of the most influential product designers of our time”, while Conran, a son of Sir Terence Conran, is the chair of the architecture and interior design practice Conran and Partners. Another signatory is Sir David Chipperfield, a winner of the Pritzker architecture prize, known for buildings including the Hepworth Wakefield gallery.
The designers say their industry’s track record “makes it hard to fathom why the government has shown such little understanding of our contribution”.
The letter highlights British achievements in design, from the red phone box and the London underground map to the Mini Cooper and the Apple iPhone. The latter was designed by the London-born Sir Jony Ive. The signatories describe themselves as “designers in the built world” who imagine and create environments and products that decorate homes and commercial public spaces around the world.
“We are concerned that the DSIT [Department for Science, Innovation and Technology] secretary of state, Peter Kyle, is running roughshod over one of our most productive and precious sectors,” the letter says.
The government is shying away from “demanding that AI companies observe the law and our copyright so that we can determine when and on what basis we share our imagination and hard work”, it says.
The designers argue that their profession, like the music industry, is built on copyright, intellectual property and patents.
“Just like the music sector, we rely on a mix of copyright and IP and patents. Interconnected and progressive, these copyright systems allow us to imagine and build the world around us.”
The government’s proposal, issued in a consultation that closed last month, is to give AI companies access to creative work such as novels, journalism, art and film clips unless the copyright holders opt out of the process. Critics of the opt-out plan have described it as unfair and impractical. The proposal also includes measures requiring AI developers to state what content they have used to train their models.
Generative AI models, the term for technology that underpins powerful tools such as the ChatGPT chatbot and the image generator Midjourney, are trained on a vast amount of data to generate highly realistic responses. The main source for this material is on the open web, ranging from the contents of Wikipedia to newspaper articles and online book archives.
A government spokesperson said the “status quo” in copyright was “holding back the creative industries, media, and AI sector from reaching their full potential”.
“We are committed to greater transparency from AI developers regarding the content used to train their models. We have always been clear that no decisions will be made until we are confident in a practical plan that meets all our objectives,” they said.
