Why the AI industry should pay for high-quality content - licensing experts offer their view

The hidden story in the increasingly fractious debate about the use of unlicensed data in AI training is that the tech industry knows it will need authoritative, high-quality data in the future. But it is also aware that its actions to date may have dissuaded originators from playing ball: even as more and more searches are zero-click, with data consumed solely within AI search, walls are going up across what remains of the human-authored Web.

Serena Dederding is General Counsel and Company Secretary at the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), a collective management organization for licensing text and images from books, journals and magazines (including some websites in the corporate, education, and public sectors). Speaking at the UK Government House of Lords’ Communications and Digital Committee’s Inquiry into AI and Copyright recently, she argued:

What is clear is that, particularly among enterprises, there is a real need and desire for ...