Growing concerns over the development of artificial intelligence has compelled the ALCS (Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Authority) - which recovers money for authors that they are due – to issue advice to members on how to respond to a government consultation on AI and copyright.

In its advice to members – headlined “Your rights are under threat. It’s time to have your say!” – the ALCS warns: “The Government’s preferred solution is to introduce a copyright exception for the use of works to train AI models, with the ability of rightsholders to ‘reserve their rights’ or ‘opt their works out’. We believe that this option is inadequate, unworkable and unbalanced against the interests of creators.”

It warns that “a model which requires individual creators to ‘opt-out’ is both deeply unfair and unworkable from a technical perspective. This option puts the onus firmly on the creators to reassert their existing legal rights, rather than on the tech companies to ask for permission. Creators cannot reasonably be expected to track every use of their work online to enforce their rights by opting out. This is likely to result in many rightsholders having their works unknowingly/unwillingly used for commercial purposes without any renumeration.”

It urges concerned members to respond to the government consultation – deadline 25 February – and also write to their MPs. 

There have been concerns about AI in the poetry world for some time. Recently the Guardian reported that poems written by AI were preferred by non-expert poetry readers to those written by humans, according to a US study.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, showed participants poems written by 10 famous English-language poets along with poems generated in the style of those poets by ChatGPT 3.5.

Real and imitation works by poets such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, and Sylvia Plath were presented to participants. The odds of a poem written by a human being judged as human-authored were roughly 75% that of an AI-generated poem being judged as human-authored.

The study also found that participants ranked AI-generated poems higher in terms of overall quality than human-written poems. The authors suggested that non-expert readers preferred AI-generated poems because they found them more straightforward and accessible.

As the technology develops rapidly, AI is becoming increasingly expert at writing poetry very quickly - poetry that is quite acceptable to some readers.