Respondents to UK AI Consultation Overwhelmingly Want AI Companies to License Copyrighted Works in All Cases

In a Progress Statement published Monday, the UK Government said that its ongoing consultation on copyright and AI has drawn over 11,500 responses, 10,112 of which were submitted via an online survey service, and that 88% of those who responded online supported requiring licenses to use copyrighted works for AI training in all cases.

The UK government has been considering exceptions to copyright infringement liability for some AI purposes, including training AI models, since December 2024. The government’s preferred solution of an “opt-out” scheme by which rights holders could choose to opt out of whether their works are used to train AI models received support from only 3% of respondents. However, the Progress Statement noted that the “distribution of preferences partly reflects the large response to the consultation from individual creators and the creative industries.”

In February, a group of 1,000 UK musicians, including popular artists such as Imogen Heap, Kate Bush and Annie Lennox, released an album titled “Is This What We Want?” in protest to the announcement in December 2024 of the consultation. The official website for the protest album explained that the unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train AI models would be deleterious to the livelihood of musicians who rely upon licensing revenues. The album featured 12 tracks, each about four minutes in length, representing the sounds of empty studios and performance spaces that the musicians said will result from the copyright exceptions for AI training. Each of the album’s tracks has a one-word title that, taken together, reads, “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies.”

According to news reports, the silent protest album was organized by British composer and technologist Ed Newton-Rex, a generative AI advocate who previously resigned from generative AI developer Stability AI over that company’s fair use stance.

Monday’s Statement was made pursuant to Section 137 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 (“the D(UA) Act”), which mandates a Report and Impact Assessment to be published by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, working jointly with the Intellectual Property Office, and the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport.

Sections 135 and 136 of the D(UA) Act require the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology to prepare and publish an economic impact assessment and a report on the use of copyright works in the development of AI systems by March 18, 2026.

The second most popular solution according to survey respondents was to make no changes at all to the copyright law (7%).

The Writer’s Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) said the Statement published Monday reveals that “creators and the creative industries have spoken in high numbers and with one voice.”

“It’s loud and clear, there is widespread opposition from the creative industries to the Government’s initial preferred option of an ‘opt out’ and a copyright exception for text and data mining,” said WGGB General Secretary Ellie Peers. “If we are to see an end to the industrial-scale theft of writers’ and other creators’ work, and to protect the creators and creative industries of the future, then UK copyright needs to be enforced not weakened,” Peers added.

The WGGB and many other creators instead support an “opt-in” model for using copyrighted works to train AI. Their statement explained: “[The Government] must protect and strengthen existing copyright protections and they must introduce transparency measures so that creators know when their work has been used to train large language models. Creators must give their explicit consent, and they must be paid.”