Met Office data and legal documents from the National Archives could be used by artificial intelligence systems as the UK government pushes ahead with plans to employ nationally owned material in AI tools.
The government is providing funds for researchers to test how Met Office content could be used by the technology, such as in helping agencies and councils know when to buy more road grit. Another project will explore whether legal data from the National Archives – the UK’s repository for official documents – could help medium- and small-sized businesses with legal support.
The government has also announced plans to license content from national institutions such as the National History Museum and the National Library of Scotland for AI development.
Ian Murray, the minister for digital government and data, said the National Archives plan was “what smart use of the public sector” looked like.
“Whether you’re a cafe owner trying to understand employment law or a shopkeeper navigating health and safety requirements, time spent wrestling with legal jargon is time spent away from customers,” he said.
“By exploring how authoritative legal data from the National Archives could be made AI-ready, we could help small businesses get quick, reliable answers to common questions – freeing up evenings and weekends and giving them more confidence to invest and grow.”
Data is a key component of AI models, the underlying technology for tools such as ChatGPT, and has become a battleground between the UK’s creative industries and the government over proposals to change copyright law.
Ministers have been criticised for proposing that AI companies should be allowed to use copyright-protected work without first seeking artists’ permission, unless the artists indicates that they wish to “opt out”. The technology secretary, Liz Kendall, said this month the government was seeking a “reset” on these plans via an official review due to be published in March.
However, the government has made clear that nationally owned data could also be used as part of its policy to drive AI deployment and development.
The government’s AI action plan, which was launched last year, proposed creating a national data library that would offer state-controlled data to researchers and companies. Keir Starmer indicated that the vast trove of health data controlled by the NHS would be a candidate for this library, although the government has also stressed that privacy, ethics and data protection will be among the issues weighed when assembling these datasets.
The action plan also proposed creating a cultural data library that would be a “commercial proposition”, meaning the government could expect to make money from the “copyright-cleared” data. This could hold data from institutions such as the BBC, the British Library, the Natural History Museum and the National Archives.
The government will push ahead with those plans on Monday with details of data will be offered under its “creative content exchange”. The exchange, which was launched in June, will be a marketplace to “sell, buy, license and enable access to digitised cultural and creative assets” so they can be “licensed at scale”.
Under a pilot scheme, researchers will explore how to offer data from institutions including Imperial War Museums; the National Library of Scotland; the Natural History Museum; the National Archives; the University of Oxford; the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the Science Museum Group and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The government said the scheme would explore how their digitised content could be used by consumers, technology companies and AI developers, “while respecting the rights of creators and copyright owners”, with a pilot platform due to be launched in the summer.
