To: The Right Hon Peter Kyle MP, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, United Kingdom

Dear Secretary of State,

We are writing to request that the government correct the record on misleading claims made in its recent consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence.

In the document introducing the consultation, the government repeatedly suggested that the question of how UK copyright law currently applies to AI training is uncertain. You personally reinforced this in the accompanying press release when you referred to “uncertainty about how copyright law applies to AI”. Other members of your department have repeated this claim many times in Parliament.

However, there is no uncertainty: commercial generative AI training on copyrighted work without a licence is illegal in the UK.

After much pushback from the creative sector, the government seems now to have accepted this: ministers who previously said the law was uncertain, including yourself, now say it is in fact clear.

While this is a welcome change of course, it does not go far enough. At no point has the government acknowledged that it misled the public in the consultation document, whether intentionally or not.

The content of government consultations matters. The public should be able to expect that the information presented to them by government, which inevitably affects their responses, is accurate. For the government to make a mistake so significant, on a point as critical as the current state of the very law the consultation may lead to the government changing, is surely unheard of.

A lot of people read the introduction to the consultation. These people were given inaccurate information on a topic that is of vital importance to many of them.

We hope you will publicly acknowledge and correct this error.

Yours sincerely,

The undersigned