Following on from the report of the Senate hearing into AI, a second big piece of news on AI this week is the launch of the White House’s “AI Action Plan.” In essence, this lays out (inter alia) the direction of travel the White House wants the relation between AI platforms and intellectual property owners to take.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
You can read the whole action plan in PDF format here. To get a gist, one might look at the section headings. The first of these reads, “Remove Red Tape and Onerous Regulation.”
Rights Holders Not a Focus
Although the creative industries and the interests of rights holders are not really (at all) discussed, that heading feels programmatic.
The president has also commented separately, at a recent industry event, on the balance between rights holders and the platforms that use them to train AI. Those comments seem to reflect a standpoint that came through a lot in the early days of the Meta case.
The argument was made there that negotiating deals with rights holders was too resource-intensive and time-consuming to be practical.
President Trump’s comments echo that, claiming that it is not feasible to pay royalties to every single rights holder from whose work AI learns.
This is very much in line with the desire to cut regulation that stands in the way of technology.
Industry Response
The publishing industry has, of course, responded. I refer you to the excellent account of this in Publishing Perspectives. Maria Pallante, ever present in these debates representing the Association of American Publishers, restates the point that “high-quality AI depends upon high-quality authorship.”
She also uses the language of national interest found in and outside of the action plan, arguing that creative industries and tech companies working together is the best way to serve those interests.
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