Don't Let It Be! Son of legendary Beatles producer demands Labour 'listen to artists' as he joins Mail campaign against controversial AI proposals
Giles Martin used Artificial Intelligence to 'reunite' The Beatles for the John Lennon hit Now And Then two years ago, but warns Labour 's plan for the technology 'makes no sense at all'.
It comes as the Government once more forced out amendments to the Bill which would have bolstered the protection of artists' copyright, in another blow for Britain's world-leading creative industry.
Mr Martin earlier hit out at the 'nonsensical' move to allow Big Tech to use creatives' work to train their algorithms for free unless the artists 'opt out'.
The Data (Use and Access) Bill primarily covers data-sharing agreements, but has received a backlash from the likes of UK Music after transparency safeguards were removed at the committee stage.
Some MPs had wanted to reintroduce the amendments which would protect copyright by forcing firms training AI models to disclose whether work by a human creator has been used.
But in a vote in Parliament last night the Government successfully resisted this.
British songs, films, paintings and news articles are protected under UK copyright law.
But the Government proposes giving Big Tech an 'exception', allowing them to access such works to train generative AI models, without permission or payment, unless creators 'opt-out' of letting them.
Ahead of the vote, Mr Martin, a Grammy-winning producer, joined fellow creatives in a protest calling on Labour to 'Make It Fair'.
He said: 'It makes no sense at all the idea of opting out. The Government has a lot of financiers and not many artists looking at this, and they seem overly impressed by tech firms making false promises.'
He said AI was 'not a bad thing' but added: 'It's like The Little Mermaid – you should own your own voice.'
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ITV News
an hour ago
- ITV News
Politics and protests: What to expect from Donald Trump's Scotland visit
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Speaking ahead of his arrival, Swinney said the global attention the visit will receive provides the opportunity to promote Scotland's tourism sector and economic investment potential, as well as to allow people to respectfully demonstrate the principles of freedom and justice. "Scotland shares a strong friendship with the United States that goes back centuries," he said ahead of the visit. "The partnership remains steadfast through economic, cultural and ancestral links - including, of course, with the president himself." The first minister said Scotland is a "proud democratic nation" that "stands firm on the principles of equality and freedom for all, and a society that stands up for a fair and just world." Swinney has been vocally critical of the US president in the past, and openly endorsed Trump's political opponent Kamala Harris before last year's election - a move branded an "insult" by a spokesperson for Trump's Scottish businesses. 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They also said that people in Scotland "simply wanted to live in peace near what is now [Trump's] vanity project golf course", and have "experienced Trump's abusive and high-handed behaviour first-hand, long before he entered the White House." Protests are planned in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dumfries. During Trump's visit to Scotland in 2018, similar gatherings drew thousands of protestors.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Australian actor Rebel Wilson sued by production company behind her own film
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New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
The abomination of Obama's nation
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Having made race a national emergency, Obama, a black male, was positioning himself as the only figure who could come to the country's rescue. Obama dared America to perceive his very self as the representation of the violence that haunted white America's imagination. But as Obama materialised the threat, as it were, he conjured it away. The fact was, as his team made sure every American knew, he was only half-black. He was distant from his Kenyan father; he had been raised by his white mother. He had been safely processed through Columbia and Harvard. He was gracious, civil and polite to a fault. White liberals announced they were shedding tears of happiness at Obama's election. But black people – while they too celebrated – held their breath for him to come through on the promises he had made. He never did. Swept into power during the Great Recession with a mandate Trump has never had, Obama found himself in a space no American president had inhabited since FDR. Black leaders implored him to implement a programme that would create jobs on a huge scale; he also could have poured money into housing and education for black people. Go big, they beseeched him, you will never have another opportunity like this one. Instead the Harvard-conditioned Obama turned to his director of the National Economic Council, the Harvard icon Larry Summers, and went small. He broke his promises to black people, and to the disenfranchised. He bent his knee to the white status quo he had promised to restructure radically. And yet Obama remains the 12th-most popular president in American history. The political effects of his presidency might have been disappointing, but the experience of having a man so warm with humanity, so cultivated, intelligent and playfully ironic was transporting. If anyone knew the US's curse, and its blessing, it was a black man who, despite his biracial nature, had come through the American reality. A majority of Americans during Obama's eight years in office felt they were in the hands of someone to whom they could, in that fantastical mental place every politician yearns to create, pour their hearts out to. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But this must be placed alongside the toxic racism Obama's self-promoting tactic of racialism provoked, and which led directly to Maga. The two strains have coupled and produced the rough beast of an entirely new American reality. The feeling, cultivated by Obama himself, that American salvation was embodied in the experience of black Americans has now been fulfilled, darkly and ironically, by Trump, who is rapidly making more and more Americans feel like disempowered, insignificant outsiders. The conflict between the two epochs each man represents is a battle for which group has suffered the truest affliction. In the eyes of Maga, they are the real wretched of this Earth. 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His public humiliation of and shocking threat to Obama in that video is unprecedented. What is bad form compared to a nightmare of chaos and autocracy? Obama himself, always alive to appearances, has merely 'addressed' the general liberal spinelessness. At an exclusive gathering of liberal luminaries last week, he chastised them for being 'cowed and intimidated and shrinking away from asserting what they believe, or least what they said they believe'. 'What's needed now is courage,' he declared. Yet as he did during his presidency, he is contented with golden phrases ringing with courage while displaying no courage at all. Instead, Obama and his successor have switched roles once again. Obama and his wife, Michelle, are set to executive-produce – it is almost too surreal to write – a comedy series about America history written by and starring that flame-throwing radical, 78-year-old Larry David, yet another of America's comedic tribunes who lucratively specialise in trivialising even America's most dangerous moment. Obama won't stand up to America's tyrant. And the answer to the question of why he won't – or cannot – could well be the answer to the question of how America came to its bizarre reckoning in the first place. [Further reading: The plot against Zohran Mamdani] Related
