Source: British Journal of Photography

The British Journal of Photography features a comment from Isabelle Doran of the Association of Photographers (AOP) on the critical issue of artificial intelligence and copyright law in the United Kingdom. Doran articulates the AOP's firm position that the current UK copyright framework is ill-equipped to handle the challenges posed by generative AI. The central argument is that the act of "scraping" or "data mining" billions of images from the internet to train AI models, without permission from or compensation to the creators, constitutes a massive and unprecedented level of copyright infringement. The AOP rejects the notion that this can be excused as a form of "text and data mining" for research purposes.

Doran highlights the significant economic and existential threat that this practice poses to professional photographers and other visual artists. The unlicensed use of their life's work to train commercial AI systems that can then generate competing images devalues their skills and undermines their ability to make a living. The AOP is advocating for a change in the law to explicitly clarify that using copyrighted works to train AI requires a license. The organization is calling for greater transparency from AI developers regarding the data used to train their models and is pushing for the government to implement robust protections that ensure creators are respected and fairly remunerated for the use of their intellectual property in the AI era.