Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, whether (a) her Department and (b) its Arm’s Length Bodies have financially supported the development of any technical solutions to protect the creative industries from unauthorised AI scraping.

The Department has not financially supported the development of any technical solutions to protect the creative industries from unauthorised AI scraping. The Government published a report on AI and copyright on 18 March outlining steps on the use of copyright works in AI training. This includes publishing a review of the mechanisms available for creators to control their works online.

Additionally, UK Research and Innovation funds various investments across Responsible AI development and adoption, including DECaDE: Centre for Decentralised Digital Economy. DECaDE undertook research across technologies to develop robust content fingerprinting, distributed provenance registries, and Trustmark, an open-source watermarking technology.