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The writer is a novelist.
In 1989, we bought a small house in the shadow of the medieval walls of Carcassonne. It was the beginning of my love affair with Languedoc: the history, the arcane mysteries hidden in the landscape, the infinite blue sky, the light on the mountains at dusk. It would inspire my first historical adventure novel, Mazewhich would be translated into 38 languages and sold in more than 40 countries. Its global success is the reason I was able to quit my day job and become a full-time writer.
Imagine my dismay, therefore, to discover that those 15 years of dreaming, researching, planning, writing, rewriting, editing, visiting libraries and archives, translating Occitan texts, searching for original documents from the 13th century, becoming an expert in Catharism, apparently they count in vain. Maze is just one of several of my novels that have been removed by The great Meta language model.. This has been done without my consent, without remuneration, or even notification. This is a theft.
I am excited 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 create, and AI can potentially give us breathing room to do the things we love. But stealing intellectual property is an attack on creativity and copyright, and will undermine the UK’s world-leading creative economy. The time has come to band together and act.
This has been a busy month in parliament for AI. On December 3, the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society released the report “Brave New World?” at a meeting of the all-party parliamentary writers group. This survey of some 13,500 authors’ attitudes toward AI threw a hand grenade into the one-sided debate over illegal scraping and crawling of authors’ work and the misconceptions surrounding it.
On December 9, Baroness Beeban Kidron called on creators to discuss three proposed amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill currently before parliament, which would make the Kingdom’s copyright law United would be applicable in the era of generative AI.
This came ahead of the government’s consultation on how to increase trust between sectors, ensuring AI developers provide rights holders with greater clarity about how their material is used. So far, so good. Except, when the framework of the consultation was revealed, it became clear that this was an attempt to fatally weaken UK copyright laws in the name of “progress”, suggesting that creators and rights holders should “opt in.” “for no reason” that his work was used for AI training.
When the House of Lords debated Kidron’s amendments this week, his peers agreed in their disdain for the government’s plans, with Kidron observing: “The government has sold the creative industries down the river.”
Artificial intelligence companies present creators as opposed to change. We are not. Every artist I know is already interacting with AI in one way or another. But a distinction needs to be made between AI that can be used brilliantly (e.g. medical diagnosis) and the fundamentals of AI models, where companies essentially steal the work of creatives for their own profit. We must not forget that artificial intelligence companies depend on creators to build their models. Without strong copyright law to ensure creators can earn a living, AI companies will lack the high-quality material that is essential for their future growth.
The UK has one of the most prosperous, innovative and profitable creative industries in the world, worth around £108 billion a year. The publishing industry alone contributes £11bn each year and has the potential to grow by a further £5.6bn over the next decade. It supports 84,000 jobs and leads the world in publishing exports, with projected growth of 20 percent 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, was intended to encourage learning and support the book trade, to create a framework in which the writers who originated their works retained all rights, making it illegal for publishers to reproduce works without permission or pay.
It is this robust and fair system that the government will undermine if it opts for an opt-out model (or “reservation of rights”, 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 play, they approach us and we make a deal. Although the technology is new and under development, the principle is the same. AI is no different. This is not just a question of justice or acting illegally, but of economic growth. If creatives have to spend time trying to locate AI companies to prevent our work from being eliminated, we will have less time to work. This, in turn, will diminish our world-leading creative industries and hurt growth.
I fully support the government in its determination to seize the future and be a global 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 a “university of the air”. This Labor government is following those steps forward-looking. But weakening copyright is not the way to do it. Putting the burden on authors and other creators to opt out is not the way to do it. Without original work there is nothing.