Hong Kong lawmakers raise concerns over AI safeguards for copyrighted works

Hong Kong lawmakers have expressed doubt about the feasibility of a government-proposed “opt-out” mechanism to protect copyrighted works from training artificial intelligence (AI) models, while one suggested the move may undermine the development of the technology.

But government officials defended their proposals on Tuesday, saying they were “reasonable” and would help facilitate AI development in the city.

Lawmakers had scrutinised proposed safeguards following the results of a public consultation on amendments to the Copyright Ordinance.

The government received 62 written submissions during the public consultation process on the amendments, of which 24 were from copyright owners or their organisations. The consultation ran from July to September last year.

Officials said that while they did not deem it necessary to implement specific copyright protections for AI-generated works, they would move forward with introducing a “text and data mining (TDM) exception” to the ordinance.

The exception, if passed, would allow for the “reasonable use” of copyrighted works for computational data and analysis processing used in training AI models.