Legendary Facebook Exec Scoffs, Says AI Could Never Be Profitable If Tech Companies Had to Ask for Artists' Consent to Ingest Their Work

Fresh on the heels from his exit from Meta, former Facebook executive Nick Clegg is defending artificial intelligence against copyright holders who want to hold the industry accountable.

As the Times of London reports, Clegg insisted during an arts festival last weekend that it's "implausible" to ask tech companies to ask for consent from creators before using their work to train their AI models.

During a speech at the Charleston Festival in East Sussex — which was, ironically enough, meant to promote his new book titled "How To Save The Internet" — Meta's former global affairs vice president initially said that it was "not unreasonable" that artists may want to "opt out of having their creativity, their products, what they’ve worked on indefinitely modeled."

But he then went on to suggest that those same artists are getting greedy.

"I think the creative community wants to go a step further," Clegg then charged. "Quite a lot of voices say 'you can only train on my content, [if you] first ask.' And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data."

"I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first," Clegg said during a speech to promote his new book, ironically titled "How to Save The Internet," that took place at this year's Charleston Festival in East Sussex, England. "I just don’t see how that would work."

The former deputy prime minister then added that if AI companies were required only in Britain to gain permission to use copyright holders' works, "you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight."

Clegg's comments came amid a fiery debate in England about AI and copyright, spurred on by a recent Parliament vote on an amendment to the UK government's data bill, which would have required companies to tell copyright holders when their work was used had it not been struck down in the House of Commons last week.

His stance also put him in opposition to Paul McCartney, Elton John, Dua Lipa, and hundreds of other artists who called on the British government to "protect copyright in the age of AI," as Sir Elton put it in an Instagram post.

Unfortunately, it seems that Parliament's lower house agreed with Clegg's sentiments and not the artists' — but history will show who was on which side of the AI wars.

More on AI and copyright: Meta Says It's Okay to Feed Copyrighted Books Into Its AI Model Because They Have No "Economic Value"