Asked by
To ask His Majesty’s Government, following the action taken by
the United States in respect of regulating artificial
intelligence, including the recent signing of an Executive Order,
whether they have plans to introduce similar provisions in UK
law.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for
Science, Innovation and Technology () (Con)
In the AI regulation White Paper we set out our first steps
towards establishing a regulatory framework for AI. We are
aligned with the United States in taking a proportionate,
context-based and evidence-led approach to AI regulation. The
White Paper did not commit to new legislation at this stage.
However, we have not ruled out legislative action in future as
and when there is evidence of substantial risks, where
non-statutory measures would be ineffective.
(Lab)
My Lords, I am a little disappointed in the Minister’s response,
but we welcome the discussions that took place at Bletchley Park.
While the Prime Minister says he will not rush to regulate, as
the Minister knows, other jurisdictions— the US and the EU—are
moving ahead. Labour in government would act swiftly to implement
a number of checks on firms developing this most powerful form of
frontier AI. A Bill might not have been in the King’s Speech, but
that does not mean that the Government cannot legislate. Will the
Minister today commit to doing so?
(Con)
The Government are by no means anti legislation; we are simply
anti legislation that is developed in advance of fully
understanding the implications of the technology, its benefits
and indeed its risks. This is a widely shared view. One of the
results of the Bletchley summit that the noble Lord mentioned
will be a state-of-the-science report convened by Professor
Bengio to take forward our understanding on this, so that
evidence-based legislation can then as necessary be put in place.
As I say, we feel that we are very closely aligned to the US
approach in this area and look forward to working closely with
the US and others going forward.
The (CB)
My Lords, the Government have noted that AI’s large language
models are trained using copyrighted data and content that is
scraped from the internet. This will constitute intellectual
property infringement if it is not licensed. What steps are the
Government taking to ensure that technology companies seek rights
holders’ informed consent?
(Con)
This is indeed a serious and complex issue, and yesterday I met
the Creative Industries Council to discuss it. Officials continue
to meet regularly both with creative rights holders and with
innovating labs, looking for common ground with the goal of
developing a statement of principles and a code of conduct to
which all sides can adhere. I am afraid to say that progress is
slow on that; there are disagreements that come down to legal
interpretations across multiple jurisdictions. Still, we remain
convinced that there is a landing zone for all parties, and we
are working towards that.
(LD)
My Lords, I welcome what the Minister has just said, and he
clearly understands this technology, its risks and indeed its
opportunities, but is he not rather embarrassed by the fact that
the Government seem to be placing a rather higher priority on the
regulation of pedicabs in London than on AI regulation?
(Con)
I am pleased to reassure the noble Lord that I am not embarrassed
in the slightest. Perhaps I can come back with a quotation from
Yann LeCun, one of the three godfathers of AI, who said in an
interview the other week that regulating AI now would be like
regulating commercial air travel in 1925. We can more or less
theoretically grasp what it might do, but we simply do not have
the grounding to regulate properly because we lack the evidence.
Our path to the safety of AI is to search for the evidence and,
based on the evidence, to regulate accordingly.
(Lab)
My Lords, an absence of regulation in an area that holds such
enormous repercussions for the whole of society will not spur
innovation but may impede it. The US executive order and the EU’s
AI Act gave AI innovators and companies in both these substantial
markets greater certainty. Will it not be the case that
innovators and companies in this country will comply with that
regulation because they will want to trade in that market, and we
will then be left with external regulation and none of our own?
Why are the Government not doing something about this?
(Con)
I think there are two things. First, we are extremely keen, and
have set this out in the White Paper, that the regulation of AI
in this country should be highly interoperable with international
regulation—I think all countries regulating would agree on that.
Secondly, I take some issue with the characterisation of AI in
this country as unregulated. We have very large areas of law and
regulation to which all AI is subject. That includes data
protection, human rights legislation, competition law, equalities
law and many other laws. On top of that, we have the recently
created central AI risk function, whose role is to identify risks
appearing on the horizon, or indeed cross-cutting AI risks, to
take that forward. On top of that, we have the most concentrated
and advanced thinking on AI safety anywhere in the world to take
us forward on the pathway towards safe, trustworthy AI that
drives innovation.
(CB)
My Lords, given the noble Viscount’s emphasis on the gathering of
evidence and evidence-based regulation, can we anticipate having
a researchers’ access to data measure in the upcoming Data
Protection and Digital Information Bill?
(Con)
I thank the noble Baroness for her question and recognise her
concern. In order to be sure that I answer the question properly,
I undertake to write to her with a full description of where we
are and to meet her to discuss further.
(Con)
My Lords, I declare my technology interests as in the register.
Does my noble friend agree that it is at least worth regulating
at this stage to require all those developing and training AI to
publish all the data and all the IP they use to train that AI on,
not least for the point around ensuring that all IP obligations
are complied with? If this approach were taken, it would enable
quite a distance to be travelled in terms of people being able to
understand and gain explainability of how the AI is working.
(Con)
I am pleased to tell my noble friend that, following a request
from the Secretary of State, the safety policies of Amazon,
Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI
and others have been published and will go into what we might
call a race to the top—a competitive approach to boosting AI
safety. As for enshrining those practices in regulation, that is
something we continue to look at.
(Lab)
My Lords, further to the question from the noble Lord, Lord
Holmes, around data—that the power of the AI is in many ways
defined by the quality of the data—does the Minister have any
concern that the Prime Minister’s friend, Elon Musk, for example,
owns a huge amount of sentiment data through Twitter, a huge
amount of transportation data through Tesla, and a huge amount of
communication data through owning more than half the satellites
orbiting the planet? Does he not see that there might be a need
to regulate the ownership of data across different sectors?
(Con)
Indeed. Of course, one of the many issues with regulating AI is
that it falls across so many different jurisdictions. It would be
very difficult for any one country, including the US, to have a
single bit of legislation that acted on the specific example that
the noble Lord mentions. That is why it is so important for us to
operate on an international basis and why we continue not just
with the AI safety summit at Bletchley Park but working closely
with the G7 and G20, bodies of the UN, GPAI and others.
(LD)
My Lords, there is significant public interest in the companies
developing artificial intelligence working together on common
safety standards, but in doing so they may run the risk of
falling foul of competition law. Will the Minister be talking to
the Competition and Markets Authority to make sure that one
public good, preventing anti-competitive practices, does not
impede another public good, the development of common safety
standards?
(Con)
Yes, indeed. It is a really important point that the development
of AI as a set of technologies is going to oblige us to work
across regulators in a variety of new ways to which we are not
yet used. That is indeed one of the functions of the newly formed
central AI risk function within DSIT.
(CB)
My Lords, can I back up the question from the noble Baroness,
Lady Kidron, on access to data by research workers, particularly
health data? Without access to that data, we will not be able to
develop generative AI such as retinal scans, for instance, and
many other developments in healthcare.
(Con)
Yes, indeed. In healthcare in this country, we have what perhaps
may well be the greatest dataset for healthcare analysis in the
world. We want to make use of that for analysis purposes and to
improve health outcomes for everybody. We do, of course, have to
be extremely careful as we use that, because that is as private
as data can possibly get.
