Simon Jones: Preventing artificial tears

After weaponising sustainability ahead of the 2024 election by making Britain’s future Net Zero targets a wedge issue among voters, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has quickly moved to pour doom and gloom on artificial intelligence (AI), warning that there may only be a year before it can no longer be controlled. On AI, at least, he may well have a point.

While Sunak uses the reference points of bio-terrorism and national security to encourage more dialogue among countries, there are other ways in which AI is outpacing the current regulations and processes needed to regulate it.

Copyright infringement is a key battleground and cases raised by it could begin to provide the legal precedents needed to start stuffing the genie back in the bottle. For example, the lawsuit raised by information services company Thomson Reuters against Ross Intelligence for unlawfully copying content from its legal-research platform Westlaw to train a competing artificial intelligence-based platform.