Elton John, Paul McCartney and thousands of other artists have called for protection from data crawling. The government must listen

Asked for a definition of intellectual property and ChatGPT answered: “IP refers to creations of the mind that are legally recognized and protected from unauthorized use by others.” The bot’s summary helpfully ended: “Intellectual property laws exist to encourage innovation and creativity by granting creators exclusive rights over their work for a certain period.

Too bad that the tech giants behind such artificial intelligence (AI) tools have chosen to play fast and loose with the rules. As Silicon Valley bosses were expressing concerns about “the distillation” of their models with the launch of the Chinese DeepSeek chatbot earlier this week, the House of Lords was debating legislation to protect against unfettered data crawling by AI.

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