The British Government has announced plans to ‘unleash AI’ to boost growth and efficiency across the UK, in an ‘AI Opportunities Action Plan’.
The plan, backed by UK tech companies, outlines strategies to improve AI infrastructure, bolster economic productivity, and foster innovation across industries.
The 50-point plan also pinpoints the possibility of creating roughly 13,250 jobs, despite many of the conversations around this powerful technology being on the dangers it poses to some job roles, including many in the creative sectors.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the plan will put the UK on track to being a front-runner in tech development and aims to “make Britain the world leader in AI”. “That means more jobs and investment in the UK, more money in people’s pockets, and transformed public services,” Starmer went on.
According to details, the Government wants to expand its compute capacity– the amount of server and storage resources available for processing data – by 20 times over the next five years.
The first step in this journey will be building a supercomputing facility aimed at doubling the capacity of the current cluster of advanced computers the ‘AI Research Resource’, which will be available to researchers and SMEs in early 2025.
Also announced was the ‘AI Energy Council’, created to mitigate concerns around large sums of energy consumption from AI and super computers, and ‘AI Growth Zones’, areas where planning permissions and energy source access will be fast-tracked for AI innovation.
In many ways, the new strategy’s main priority is to make the UK a leading place for AI innovation in the world. Peter Kyle, science and technology secretary told the BBC that there was no reason the UK couldn’t build a leading tech giant like Google, Amazon and Apple, who are all leading AI innovators.
A danger to creativity?
Despite the possible economic and industry benefits AI development poses, there continues to be ongoing discourse on the impact of AI on creative jobs, particularly since the advent of image and video generating technologies like Sora and MidJourney.
Creatives are also concerned about the use of their works, such as art, writing and music, in training AI without permission.
In response to the ‘AI Opportunities Action Plan’, The Creative Rights in AI Coalition called on the Government to provide reassurance that copyrighted works owned by creatives will continue to be protected.
Under these new plans, a creative will be able to opt out of their work being used to train AI. Yet, how the exercising of this choice will be implemented is still unclear.
Many celebrities, including the likes of Stephen Fry, Kate Bush and Kevin Bacon, have signed a petition to warn the dangers of “the unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI”.
The petition, which has been signed by almost 40,000 people, says using copyrighted works without permission “is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”
