Music legend Paul McCartney has called out the UK government to do more to protect UK creatives from potential AI copyright law changes.

Artists of various mediums have consistently come out and warned authorities of the potential creative and financial fallout of AI data scraping – the process by which AI models gather data to train themselves on.

At the end of last year, the UK government put out a consultation to potentially change UK copyright law, allowing tech companies to train their AI models on online content, even copyrighted material, unless copyright holders opt out of such training.

This puts the onus on creatives, publishers, and content generators to opt out of data scraping and AI training on their data, which critics have said can prove ineffective. Content creators may not have the time or capacity to opt out of what could be thousands of different AI training modules, and the copyright law may need each piece of intellectual material to be individually protected in an opt out.

McCartney said in a BBC interview that the UK government needs to do more to protect artists.

“We’re the people, you’re the government!” he said in an interview. “You’re supposed to protect us. That’s your job. So if you’re putting through a bill, make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not going to have them.”

The Bill McCartney refers to is the UK consultation, which does stipulate that copyrighted material can only be used to train AI models, not be used to generate specific content. However, with generative AI, this line is particularly blurred.

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Artists and authors have previously slammed AI Large Language Models for being trained on their copyrighted material without their consent, and governments have scrambled to figure out an approach that protects creative licensing as well as ensures AI has a broad pool of data to train on.

McCartney is not wholly against AI, however, having used it to produce a new Beatles song from an old cassette recording of John Lennon, that reached critical acclaim.

“I think AI is great and it can do a lot of great things,” Sir McCartney said.

“But it shouldn’t rip creative people off. There’s no sense in that.”

Following backlash from critics of the proposed opt-out proposal, an alternative bill, which would allow AI to only train on copyrighted data if artists opt in, it set to be put forth in the House of Lords this week.