Comment by Ed Newton-Rex

To be clear: opting all of this music out of generative AI training is all but impossible. Despite this, there are legislators in various countries who are being convinced, thanks to lobbying from the most powerful and valuable AI companies, that providing a right to opt out of training would represent some sort of sensible compromise between AI companies (who scrape and train models on the world’s content) and creators and rights holders (who mostly view this as illegal and immoral). The UK government is the latest to reportedly favor this solution to the growing disagreement between the two sides – a disagreement that is existential for the creative industries. But opt-out is no compromise. As I outline in this essay, opt-out schemes in generative AI are not only egregiously unfair to rights holders – they simply do not work. They give rights holders the illusion of control over how their works are used; nothing more.