Elton John calls Labour ‘absolute losers' over AI

Sir Elton John has called the Government 'absolute losers' over its plans to regulate AI.
The singer, 78, described one Cabinet minister as a 'bit of a moron' for not forcing tech companies to disclose which content they are using to train artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Hundreds of news and creative organisations, including The Telegraph, backed a campaign to make the AI development process more transparent.
Sir Elton said the companies were 'committing theft, thievery, on a high scale'.
Speaking on the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, he said he felt 'incredibly betrayed' by the Government and alluded to taking legal action.
This week, ministers rejected an amendment to the Government's Data Bill, which was proposed by Baroness Kidron, to force companies to notify copyright holders if their work is used to train generative AI models.
Creatives such as Robbie Williams and Dame Shirley Bassey have argued that without the 'transparency' clause, their content would effectively be stolen.
Sir Elton warned that the Government is on course to 'rob young people of their legacy and their income', adding that Sir Keir Starmer and his Cabinet were 'just being absolute losers... about it'.
He said the Prime Minister needed to 'wise up' and singled out Peter Kyle, the Tech Secretary, as 'a bit of a moron'.
'We'll fight it all the way,' he said, indicating that he and other artists would take legal action.
Sir Elton continued: 'The House of Lords did a vote and it was more than two to one in our favour.
'The Government just looked at it as if to say, 'Hmm, well the old people...like me can afford it'.'
Mr Kyle had previously supported rules that would have required copyright holders to 'opt out' if they did not want their content to be used by AI.
But the Government has softened its stance and said it would produce a policy proposal on how to manage AI within a year of the Data Bill being signed into law.
Its opponents have said this means AI companies will be given carte blanch to use copyrighted content in the meantime without the owners knowing.
Some tech companies have previously been found to have used pirated content from the internet to train AI services, which creatives believe will reduce the demand for human-generated music, books and art.
Government softens stance
Last week, Baroness Kidron's amendment passed in the House of Lords with a majority of 147 peers, marking a significant defeat for the Government.
However, ministers stripped out the amendment when the bill returned to the House of Commons on Wednesday after arguing that it would place a financial burden on the Treasury.
The Commons holds the exclusive right to allocate public funds in UK law.
A Government spokesman said ministers want the creative industries and AI companies to 'flourish, which is why we're consulting on a package of measures that we hope will work for both sectors'.
They added that it was 'equally important that we put in the groundwork now as we consider the next steps'.
The spokesman continued: 'That is why we have committed to publishing a report and economic impact assessment – exploring the broad range of issues and options on all sides of the debate.'

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Sky News

an hour ago

• Sky News

US warplanes transit through UK: Here's what the flight tracking data shows

Flight tracking data shows extensive movement of US military aircraft towards the Middle East in recent days, including via the UK. Fifty-two US military planes were spotted flying over the eastern Mediterranean towards the Middle East between Monday and Thursday. That includes at least 25 that passed through Chania airport, on the Greek island of Crete - an eight-fold increase in the rate of arrivals compared to the first half of June. The movement of military equipment comes as the US considers whether to assist Israel in its conflict with Iran. Of the 52 planes spotted over the eastern Mediterranean, 32 are used for transporting troops or cargo, 18 are used for mid-air refuelling and two are reconnaissance planes. Forbes McKenzie, founder of McKenzie Intelligence, says that this indicates "the build-up of warfighting capability, which was not [in the region] before". Sky's data does not include fighter jets, which typically fly without publicly revealing their location. An air traffic control recording from Wednesday suggests that F-22 Raptors are among the planes being sent across the Atlantic, while 12 F-35 fighter jets were photographed travelling from the UK to the Middle East on Wednesday. Many US military planes are passing through UK A growing number of US Air Force planes have been passing through the UK in recent days. Analysis of flight tracking data at three key air bases in the UK shows 63 US military flights landing between 16 and 19 June - more than double the rate of arrivals earlier in June. On Thursday, Sky News filmed three US military C-17A Globemaster III transport aircraft and a C-130 Hercules military cargo plane arriving at Glasgow's Prestwick Airport. Flight tracking data shows that one of the planes arrived from an air base in Jordan, having earlier travelled there from Germany. What does Israel need from US? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on 15 March that his country's aim is to remove "two existential threats - the nuclear threat and the ballistic missile threat". Israel says that Iran is attempting to develop a nuclear bomb, though Iran says its nuclear facilities are only for civilian energy purposes. A US intelligence assessment in March concluded that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. President Trump dismissed the assessment on Tuesday, saying: "I think they were very close to having one." Forbes McKenzie says the Americans have a "very similar inventory of weapons systems" to the Israelis, "but of course, they also have the much-talked-about GBU-57". The GBU-57 is a 30,000lb bomb - the largest non-nuclear bomb in existence. Mr McKenzie explains that it is "specifically designed to destroy targets which are very deep underground". Experts say it is the only weapon with any chance of destroying Iran's main enrichment site, which is located underneath a mountain at Fordow. Air-to-air refuelling could allow Israel to carry larger bombs Among the dozens of US aircraft that Sky News tracked over the eastern Mediterranean in recent days, more than a third (18 planes) were designed for air-to-air refuelling. "These are crucial because Israel is the best part of a thousand miles away from Iran," says Sky News military analyst Sean Bell. "Most military fighter jets would struggle to do those 2,000-mile round trips and have enough combat fuel." The ability to refuel mid-flight would also allow Israeli planes to carry heavier munitions, including bunker-buster bombs necessary to destroy the tunnels and silos where Iran stores many of its missiles. Satellite imagery captured on 15 June shows the aftermath of Israeli strikes on a missile facility near the western city of Kermanshah, which destroyed at least 12 buildings at the site. At least four tunnel entrances were also damaged in the strikes, two of which can be seen in the image below. Writing for Jane's Defence Weekly, military analyst Jeremy Binnie says it looked like the tunnels were "targeted using guided munitions coming in at angles, not destroyed from above using penetrator bombs, raising the possibility that the damage can be cleared, enabling any [missile launchers] trapped inside to deploy". "This might reflect the limited payloads that Israeli aircraft can carry to Iran," he adds. Penetrator bombs, also known as bunker-busters, are much heavier than other types of munitions and as a result require more fuel to transport. Israel does not have the latest generation of refuelling aircraft, Mr Binnie says, meaning it is likely to struggle to deploy a significant number of penetrator bombs. Israel has struck most of Iran's western missile bases Even without direct US assistance, the Israeli air force has managed to inflict significant damage on Iran's missile launch capacity. Sky News has confirmed Israeli strikes on at least five of Iran's six known missile bases in the west of the country. On Monday, the IDF said that its strategy of targeting western launch sites had forced Iran to rely on its bases in the centre of the country, such as Isfahan - around 1,500km (930 miles) from Israel. Among Iran's most advanced weapons are three types of solid-fuelled rockets fitted with highly manoeuvrable warheads: Fattah-1, Kheibar Shekan and Haj Qassam. The use of solid fuel makes these missiles easy to transport and fast to launch, while their manoeuvrable warheads make them better at evading Israeli air defences. However, none of them are capable of striking Israel from such a distance. Iran is known to possess five types of missile capable of travelling more than 1,500km, but only one of these uses solid fuel - the Sijjil-1. On 18 June, Iran claimed to have used this missile against Israel for the first time. Iran's missiles have caused significant damage Iran's missile attacks have killed at least 24 people in Israel and wounded hundreds, according to the Israeli foreign ministry. The number of air raid alerts in Israel has topped 1,000 every day since the start of hostilities, reaching a peak of 3,024 on 15 June. Iran has managed to strike some government buildings, including one in the city of Haifa on Friday. And on 13 June, in Iran's most notable targeting success so far, an Iranian missile impacted on or near the headquarters of Israel's defence ministry in Tel Aviv. Most of the Iranian strikes verified by Sky News, however, have hit civilian targets. These include residential buildings, a school and a university. On Thursday, one missile hit the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, southern Israel's main hospital. More than 70 people were injured, according to Israel's health ministry. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said that Iran had struck a nearby technology park containing an IDF cyber defence training centre, and that the "blast wave caused superficial damage to a small section" of the hospital. However, the technology park is in fact 1.2km away from where the missile struck. Photos of the hospital show evidence of a direct hit, with a large section of one building's roof completely destroyed. Iran successfully struck the technology park on Friday, though its missile fell in an open area, causing damage to a nearby residential building but no casualties. Israel has killed much of Iran's military leadership It's not clear exactly how many people Israel's strikes in Iran have killed, or how many are civilians. Estimates by human rights groups of the total number of fatalities exceed 600. What is clear is that among the military personnel killed are many key figures in the Iranian armed forces, including the military's chief of staff, deputy head of intelligence and deputy head of operations. Key figures in the powerful Revolutionary Guard have also been killed, including the militia's commander-in-chief, its aerospace force commander and its air defences commander. On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that US assistance was not necessary for Israel to win the war. "We will achieve all our objectives and hit all of their nuclear facilities," he said. "We have the capability to do that." 3:49 Forbes McKenzie says that while Israel has secured significant victories in the war so far, "they only have so much fuel, they only have so many munitions". "The Americans have an ability to keep up the pace of operations that the Israelis have started, and they're able to do it for an indefinite period of time." Additional reporting by data journalist Joely Santa Cruz and OSINT producers Freya Gibson, Lina-Sirine Zitout and Sam Doak.

Times

an hour ago

• Times

Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter: from Disney to festival headliners

Eight days apart, at the British Summer Time stage in Hyde Park, in front of a crowd of 65,000, two glittering, platinum pop titans will perform. First up, next Friday, is Olivia Rodrigo: 22 years old, 46 million monthly listeners on Spotify; 14 Grammy nominations; three wins; and about to headline Glastonbury. Then, on July 5 and 6, Sabrina Carpenter: 26 years old, 70 million monthly listeners on Spotify; six Grammy nominations; two wins; her song Espresso the biggest single of 2024 by a female artist. The pair have often been depicted as bitter rivals: two Disney Channel alumni whose overlapping journeys to superstardom were powered partly by lyrics that may, or may not, have been written about the same ex-boyfriend. But really, they are both lessons in how to pull off the Disney breakaway — what happens when young women wriggle out of their contracts and embrace their new freedom by singing about the brutality and reality of modern girlhood, its shattering heartbreaks and the fun of the rebound. One of the things that marks both of them out is the obsessiveness with which their fans pore over their songs and image-making, whether it's Rodrigo last week being accused on social media of ordering a Nashville music venue to take down Taylor Swift imagery before she filmed there — it was actually removed by the venue for legal reasons — or Carpenter sending the internet into meltdown with the suggestive cover art for her new album, Man's Best Friend. Rodrigo grew up in Temacula, California, a theatre kid in a family who did other things — her mother a teacher, her father a therapist. After various singing competitions and school productions, she was made the lead in the American Girl doll franchise movie at 12 years old and, the following year, cast in Disney's Bizaardvark and then High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, a mockumentary. Rodrigo was homeschooled, studying for her exams on set. 'Like, 'Oh shit, I worked my whole childhood and I'm never going to get it back,'' she told The Guardian in 2023. 'I didn't go to football games, I didn't have this group of girlfriends that I hung out with after school. That's kind of sad.' After a song she wrote for the High School Musical show went viral, Rodrigo sought a record deal, choosing not to make music for Disney's in-house label. She went with Interscope/Geffen. Disney allowed her to break her contract before the show's fourth series and, during the pandemic, Rodrigo sat down to write. In 2021 her song Drivers License went stratospheric, breaking a Spotify record as the first song to hit 80 million streams in seven days. The track reached No 1 in 48 countries on Apple Music, 31 countries on Spotify and 14 countries on YouTube. 'It's been the absolute craziest week of my life,' she said in an interview. 'My entire life just, like, shifted in an instant.' Four months later she released her debut album, Sour, a pop-punk triumph about her teenage heartbreak, the songs searing and seething with anger, underwritten by longing and ache — all written by a 17-year-old, with her producer, Dan Nigro. Though she stretched her legs in the ballads, it was her stroppy, plucky rock which was particularly satisfying. Critics, with some arch surprise that it had come from a squeaky-clean Disney-kid, gave the album rave reviews. At Glastonbury 2022 she brought on Lily Allen to sing Allen's 2009 banger F*** You, dedicating it to the Supreme Court justices who had just overturned the Roe v Wade abortion ruling in the United States. 'I'm devastated and terrified, and so many women and so many girls are going to die because of this,' Rodrigo said on stage, having spent hours memorising her speech. As well as being a great song with crushing lyrics, it created a perfect storm of gossip and intrigue. 'And you're probably with that blonde girl,' she sang, 'who always made me doubt — she's so much older than me.' Fans were convinced she was singing about her former Disney co-star Joshua Bassett, with whom they thought she had a romantic relationship. The 'blonde girl', they suspected, was Sabrina Carpenter, who was rumoured to have dated Bassett the next summer. 'I put it out not knowing that it would get that reaction, so it was really strange [when] it did,' Rodrigo told Variety. 'I just remember [everyone being] so weird and speculative about stuff they had no idea about.' She also said she and Carpenter had only met 'once or twice in passing'. 'So I don't think I could write a song that was meaningful or emotional about somebody that I don't know.' In January 2021, two weeks after Drivers License blew up, Carpenter released Skin. 'Maybe 'blonde' was the only rhyme,' went the lyrics. 'You been telling your side, so I'll be telling mine.' She, like Rodrigo, was not drawn on specifics. 'The song isn't calling out one single person,' she wrote on Instagram. 'Some lines address a specific situation, while other lines address plenty of other experiences I've had this past year.' The internet whirled, creating soap opera plots around them. They both later said they received a barrage of death threats. Bassett told People magazine that he received so much hate that he was taken to hospital, diagnosed with septic shock. 'I have a right to stand up for myself,' he told GQ. 'People don't know anything they're talking about.' For his part Bassett, 24, has just been on a European tour, playing venues in Glasgow, Birmingham and London that are about 20 times smaller than his apparent exes' Hyde Park performances. Carpenter, meanwhile, has hit mega fame. Her sixth album, Short n' Sweet — she is 5ft tall — debuted at No 1 in America. Her single Espresso went platinum in more than a dozen countries and won a Grammy for best pop solo performance. The Disney empire first claimed Carpenter, who grew up East Greenville, Pennsylvania, at 12 years old, signing her into a five-record deal, after which she starred in its show Girl Meets World. After family-friendly pop, Carpenter broke away from the label after just four albums ('I definitely didn't fulfil my contract, thank god,' she told Vogue) and signed with Island Records at 22. Her fifth album, Emails I Can't Send, took a turn towards something more grown-up — and cheeky. 'Woke up this morning, thought I'd write a pop hit,' she trills. Her image shifted again for Short n' Sweet, taking on a hyper-femme, soft-edged, Betty Boop look, her blonde hair big and bouncing. As Time magazine put it: 'She's short, she's funny, and she's horny.' But as she became more of a sex bomb, she got more sardonic. 'You'll just have to taste me when he's kissing you,' she sings in Taste. Her video for Please Please Please featured her then-boyfriend, the actor Barry Keoghan, shortly after his viral scene in Saltburn, in which he is so lustful for his friend he drinks his bathwater. During her performance at Coachella, she swapped her lyrics around with a wink. 'He's drinking my bathwater like it's red wine,' she sang. After their break-up, the internet is again spinning with speculation that her new song, Manchild, relates to him. 'This song became to me something I can look back on that will score the mental montage to the very confusing and fun young adult years of life,' she wrote on social media. It includes the couplet: 'Never heard of self-care/ Half your brain just ain't there.' Carpenter's amped-up naughtiness, however, now runs the risk of tipping into alienation. Her recent album cover, which shows her on her knees in front of a man's legs, while a hand pulls her hair, drew enormous criticism including from Glasgow Women's Aid. Her caricature of the sexualised, submissive woman suddenly looked exactly like the thing it was supposed to be riffing off. At Hyde Park, Rodrigo and Carpenter will hit the same stage on successive weekends after sold-out arena tours, their fans trailing in stomper boots and eyeliner (Rodrigo) or sequins and pale-pink babydoll dresses (Carpenter). It is a very modern coming-of-age story, two young women whose specificity of lyrics and canny presentation of their personal lives have whipped up a frenzy of speculation; whose rage and cheek and charm has been released on the world; who dazzle and glitter — and kick 'em where it hurts.

Times

an hour ago

• Times

I'm grieving and I made a mistake, now my £8k inheritance is lost

My mother died recently, which was the last in a sequence of horrible events after the death of my son and my own cancer diagnosis. Mum left me a small inheritance of £8,370 which was sent to my NatWest account. I planned to transfer it to an account that my husband holds with Lloyds so that he could buy a new boiler for our house. We are both pensioners and the money from my mum's estate is a lifeline to us. I made the transfer through my NatWest banking app, but I wasn't thinking clearly when I sent it instead to my Lloyds credit card, which had expired years ago. I know there's no excuse for this error but my mum's death was a dreadful experience. I am also still unwell and undergoing a series of investigations, which I hope goes some way to explain why I wasn't thinking clearly when I sent this payment. I immediately realised that the money had gone to the wrong account and felt sick to my stomach. I was in tears and spoke to NatWest to see if it could retrieve the money from Lloyds. Dealing with various Lloyds call centres has also been an absolute nightmare. I have been promised return calls that never materialise. I have been on hold for hours at a time while the operators vary from being pleasant to rude and impatient. I admit I've become frustrated and tearful at times but I have always explained the background of my situation. I made the mistake 12 days ago and the funds have now disappeared into the ether. No one will tell me where the money is or when I will get it back. I just want the money returned to my NatWest account. The stress of this situation is having a serious affect on my already poor health. I am terrified I won't see this money again, which is sorely and address supplied I was so sorry to hear of the devastating series of events that had turned your life upside down and can totally understand why you were not thinking clearly when you made this payment. Usually when money is sent to an expired account, the payment is retrieved and returned to the source. But your case was slightly different because there was an outstanding debt linked to your old credit card account. You told me this amounted to £60 but you had long forgotten about it. The problem was that this debt had been outstanding for so long that Lloyds had passed the account's history to a debt collection agency. This made it harder for Lloyds to track down the account. Plus, as the account was no longer active it was difficult for it to match your details to the information it had in its system. Thankfully when I stepped in Lloyds found the payment, and a few days later the money was back in your NatWest account. You have now also repaid the £60 debt. I felt that Lloyds should have helped you sooner, instead of leaving you in the lurch and giving you conflicting information at a time of extreme distress. It explained that because of the different teams involved in locating and returning the money, the information you were given depended on which team you were talking to. Those teams were not linked up, which is also why you didn't get the return calls you were promised. Lloyds said: 'We're here to help customers during difficult moments and we're sincerely sorry the support we gave our customer was not at the level she rightly expected. We've returned her money and made a payment in recognition that our service wasn't good enough on this occasion.' It gave you £250 compensation and has told you about several charities that may be able to give you some extra support. You said: 'It's clear that this was resolved as a result of your intervention so I can't thank you enough.' • Read more money advice and tips on investing from our experts I work for a small business that sells memorabilia and over the past five years we have used a company called Bionic to manage our gas and electricity deals. When our contract is coming up for renewal, Bionic sends us quotes from suppliers and arranges the switch on our behalf. We had an email from Bionic last September telling us that our contract with British Gas was ending in May. We decided we would shop around and get our own quotes to see if we could get a better deal. I contacted Bionic online in September to say that we no longer needed its services. The agent said we should wait until the company had sent the next quote before opting out. When we got the quotes later that month, I got back in touch using its webchat service to confirm that we didn't want to go ahead with the renewal. I made it clear that we no longer wanted Bionic to act on our behalf and, based on this conversation, I assumed that our contract with the company had been terminated. A few months later I contacted British Gas to check when our energy deal ended, but was told that Bionic had already signed us up for another three-year deal with the company. We were not sent any information about this new deal and had given Bionic sufficient notice to terminate our contract, so we can't understand how this happened. I complained to Bionic but it said it had no record of the second webchat conversation in September where I had confirmed that we wanted to opt out. We have gone back and forth with Bionic to try and get it to cancel this contract that we never agreed to, but to no Lancashire • Compare exchange rates with our currency converter Bionic told me that it had sent you an email to confirm the new contract, but this was news to you and you said you never got the email. I was surprised that Bionic had signed you up to a three-year contract without you agreeing to it, but it explained that its digital renewal service is designed so that, unless a customer gets in touch to opt out, it assumes that they are happy with the quote and automatically signs them up. One Bionic email contained a quote and gave you three days to opt out. Once that deadline was reached, you were then locked into a contract and couldn't cancel. Three days seems like a very small window of time to opt out, which I imagine could catch out some people if they missed an email, yet Bionic said that suppliers can hold prices only for a short time. I also thought it was odd that Bionic finalised your contract eight months before your contract expired. It told me that it buys in bulk up to 12 months in advance and that, because of this, its customers get discounts on deals and are shielded from the price movements in the energy market. But regardless of this, you said you had made it clear that you wanted to cancel before the contract was finalised, so why didn't Bionic act on that? It showed me a transcript of the conversation on September 17 where you said you would like to cancel, but were urged to wait until the latest quotes had come through before confirming that you wanted to opt out. You said there was a subsequent webchat on September 26 where you had confirmed that you wished to cancel, but Bionic claimed it had no record of it. It also said that it has never lost a webchat and told me that it has 'complete and accurate records of all interactions'. • Online antique buyer lost my 91-year-old mum's treasures I could not work out why your version of events was different to Bionic's, but after I stepped in, it agreed to cancel your contract. Bionic said: 'Customers can choose to opt out of our digital renewal service at any time prior to finalisation of a replacement contract. As a gesture of goodwill and a demonstration of our commitment to ensuring customer satisfaction, we are prepared to arrange the cancellation of the replacement contract.' You have now arranged a contract directly with a supplier and said: 'This is the outcome that we wanted, but it is still very frustrating that we had to go through this ordeal in the first place. I believe this would not be resolved without your input, so thank you.' • £868,409 — the amount Your Money Matters has saved readers so far this year If you have a money problem you would like Katherine Denham to investigate email yourmoneymatters@ Please include a phone number