Former Meta exec says asking for artist permission will kill AI industry

• Nick Clegg, former Meta executive and UK Deputy Prime Minister, has reiterated a familiar line when it comes to AI and artist consent.
• He said that any push for consent would “basically kill” the AI industry.
• Clegg added that the sheer volume of data that AI is trained on makes it “implausible” to ask for consent.

Is the AI industry too big to fail? Recent comments from former Meta executive and UK Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, would indicate as much.

Clegg, who was speaking to The Times (paywall) regarding policies and frameworks surrounding the AI industry, unpacked artists consent when it comes to the training of models. Quite frankly, Clegg said any such push to gain artist consent before training models would be untenable, adding that it would “basically kill” the AI industry.

“I think the creative community wants to go a step further. 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,” he told the publication.

Clegg is not the first executive in tech to say so, with OpenAI making similar comments in March this year.

The AI startup, however, framed its argument in terms of the United States being the leader for AI development globally, with companies from China like DeepSeek and Manus potentially upending the current order.

“America’s robust, balanced intellectual property system has long been key to our global leadership on innovation. We propose a copyright strategy that would extend the system’s role into the Intelligence Age by protecting the rights and interests of content creators while also protecting America’s AI leadership and national security,” OpenAI shared in a blog post.

“The federal government can both secure Americans’ freedom to learn from AI, and avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the PRC by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material,” it added.

Back to Clegg and his argument against regulation or artist consent boils down to it simply being difficult logistically. He also pointed out that if the UK alone enforced such policies, it would quickly be left behind by other nations forcing ahead with AI development unfettered.

“I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work,” he noted.

“And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight,” he stressed.

While we must agree that gaining consent to train models on all the data it looks at is a substantial undertaking, the fact remains that such practices are tantamount to copyright infringement.

This is an issue that not only impacts artists, but writers, musicians, and any other creative field too, although it is looking increasingly likely that such concerns will continue to be pushed to the wayside in favour of the “need” for rapid development in AI.

With the global AI Industry expected to grow from $757 billion in 2025 to $3.6 trillion by 2034, capitalism appears to be winning out so far.

[Image – Photo by Peter Olexa on Unsplash]