Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up artificial intelligence myFT Digest – delivered straight to your inbox.
The writer is a novelist
In 1989, we bought a small house in the shadow of Carcassonne's medieval city walls. It was the beginning of my love affair with Languedoc – the history, the mysterious secrets hidden in the landscape, the endless blue skies, the light over the mountains at dusk. It will be the inspiration for my first historical adventure novel, A mazewhich will be translated into 38 languages and sold in more than 40 countries. Its global success is the reason I quit my day job and become a full-time writer.
Imagine my dismay, then, when I discover that those fifteen years of dreaming, researching, planning, writing, rewriting, editing, visiting libraries and archives, translating Occitan texts, searching for original documents dating back to the thirteenth century, and becoming an expert in… Catharism, apparently, is a big deal. For nothing. A maze It's just one of many of my novels that was deleted Big meta language model. This was done without my consent, without pay, and without even notice. This is theft.
I am passionate about artificial intelligence and its possibilities. Using technology to improve, develop, experiment and innovate is part of any artist's toolkit. We need time to be creative, and AI can potentially give us breathing room to do the things we love. But intellectual property theft constitutes an assault on creativity and copyright, and would undermine the UK's world-leading creative economy. It is time to come together and act.
This has been a busy month in Parliament for Amnesty International. On December 3, the Author Licensing and Aggregation Association launched a report titled “Brave New World?” At a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Writers Group. This survey of nearly 13,500 authors' attitudes toward AI has thrown a grenade into the one-sided debate about illegal scraping and crawling of authors' works and the misconceptions surrounding it.
On 9 December, Baroness Beban Kidron invited creators to discuss three proposed amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill currently going through Parliament, which would make UK copyright law enforceable in the age of generative AI.
This occurred ahead of government consultations on how to strengthen trust between sectors, ensuring that AI developers provide rights holders with greater clarity on how their material will be used. So far, so good. Except that when the consultation framework was unveiled, it became clear that it was an attempt to fatally weaken UK copyright laws in the name of “progress” by suggesting that creators and rights holders should “opt out” of their work. Used to train artificial intelligence.
When the House of Lords debated Kidron's amendments this week, peers were united in their disdain for the government's plans, with Kidron saying: “The government has sold the creative industries down the river.”
AI companies present innovators as anti-change. We are not. Every artist I know is already dealing with AI in one way or another. But a distinction must be made between AI that can be used in cool ways — for example, medical diagnosis — and the foundations of AI models, where companies essentially steal the work of creators for their own profits. We should not forget that AI companies rely on innovators to build their models. Without a strong copyright law that ensures creators can earn a living, AI companies will lack the high-quality materials necessary for their future growth.
The UK has one of the most thriving, innovative and profitable creative industries in the world, worth around £108 billion annually. The publishing industry alone contributes £11 billion each year, and has the potential to raise another £5.6 billion in the next decade. It supports 84,000 jobs and leads the world in publishing exports, with 20 percent growth expected by 2033. In the film industry, 70 percent of the top 20 grossing films in 2023 were based on books.
One of the reasons for this global success is that we have strong and fair copyright laws. The United Kingdom was a pioneer in this. The Statute of Anne, passed in 1710, aimed to encourage learning and support the book trade, and to create a framework in which writers who created a work retained full rights, making it illegal for publishers to reproduce the work without permission or compensation.
It is this strong and fair system that the government will undermine if it follows an opt-out – or “rights-reserved” in the new parlance – rather than an opt-in model. Why should we writers bear the burden of preventing AI companies from stealing our work? If a producer wants to make a movie, a radio show, or a theater piece out of it, they contact us and we make a deal. Although the technology is new and advanced, the principle is the same. Artificial intelligence is no different. It's not just about fairness or acting illegally, it's about economic growth. If creators had to spend time trying to track down AI companies to put us out of business, we would have less time to act. This, in turn, will diminish our world-leading creative industries and hurt growth.
I fully support the government in its determination to harness the future and be a world leader in AI innovation. More than sixty years ago, at the 1963 Labor Party conference, Harold Wilson spoke of the “white heat of the technological revolution” and the “University of the Air”. This Labor government is following in the footsteps of that progressive thinking. But weakening copyright is not the way to do it. Putting the burden on authors and other creators to opt out is not the right way to do it. Without the original work, there is nothing.
