Just like public broadcasters were established with the rise of television as a new technology, why couldn't we establish a public pillar today with the rise of artificial intelligence? This idea was presented by the German Paul Keller, Director of Policy at the Open Future Foundation lobbying group, in Brussels during a panel discussion with several actors in the field, titled "sustaining original content in the age of AI" on October 14th. The idea was not met with great enthusiasm by everyone.
Keller observes that AI fits into the category of technological communication innovations that will drastically transform our society, much like the internet, television and radio did before. With the internet, everything was left to the private sector, and governments played only a limited regulatory role, which Keller believes had major negative consequences. However, with radio and television, governments played a significant role from the outset. Keller believes this was beneficial for the market because public broadcasters also attract talent, act as market regulators and maintain high quality. He assumes that these positive effects would also exist with the establishment of a kind of "public AI" fed by knowledge of the public domain. He believes that copyright law alone will not protect us from excesses of major AI developers and thinks that “Public AI” could be financed by a type of tax imposed on current large private AI developers.
In the panel discussion he presented this idea to several actors in the market: Ioan Kaes of AEPO-Artis, Stefan Kaufmann of Wikimedia Germany and Renate Schroeder of the European Federation of Journalists were quite or very receptive to his idea, while Guiseppe Abbamonte of DG Connect of the European Commission primarily pointed out that such a tax could actually prevent smaller "ethical" players in that field from staying solvent.
German MEP Tiemo Wölken (S&D) and French Professor Alexandra Bensamoun also shared their insights on how to regulate AI developers. German MEP Tiemo Wölken (S&D) advocated for an opt-out management system and believes that MEP Axel Voss's strategy (who proposes a complex opt-out registry) will plunge us into years of uncertainty. He's looking for a solution without changing the copyright directive.
Bensamoun presented the report she submitted to the French government in May of this year to compensate for the use of cultural content by AI systems. For this, she developed a model involving a mediator to arbitrate between rights holders and AI providers, analogous to other cultural sectors such as publishers, media, etc. She stresses that AI providers are in great need of massive content and that the cultural sector is in urgent need of a legal framework to deliver this.
Bensamoun also advocates a radical idea in the whole discussion about the Text and Data Mining (TDM) exception of the 2019 EU Copyright Directive: the exception is an "ineffective" rule and therefore essentially "non-existent."
Written by: Philippe François, CEPIC Vice President