AI vs ARTISTS: A Dangerous Cultural Misunderstanding

Copyright is the favourite subject of very few people; I know that. But the current fight to protect artists’ rights matters to everyone. Not just because these are people whose property deserves as much protection as any other property, but because running underneath the row is a failure to understand what art does and why it, and the people who make it, are fundamental to a healthy, productive society. So bear with me….

In December 2024, the British government opened a public consultation on copyright and AI. Ever since ChatGP bounced onto the scene, writers, musicians and visual artists have had to come face to face with the reality that this new technology is acquiring its ‘intelligence’ by scraping their work. In effect, this means several things.

· The gigantic value generated by AI companies owes a huge amount to work done by others who are being paid nothing for their contributions. Nor is their permission being sought.

· Copyright protection exists the minute a musician, writer or artists produces a work; no formalities are required. This makes it a beautifully easy system to enforce. But AI flouts that legal protection each time it scrapes an artist’s work. It’s a bit like automating shop lifting.

· The capacity for artists to earn income from their work is threatened by a technology with the capacity to generate a limitless number of derivative works, effectively depriving the artist of opportunity and livelihood. The scriptwriter (and Member of Parliament) Alison Hume recently found out that the subtitles for one of her TV scripts had been scraped. She worries now that it can be used to generate scripts that could one day replace her. Her legal rights have been violated and her future earnings threatened. And the BBC, funded by licence-fee payers, can’t protect the work they paid for.

Hume’s fears aren’t imaginary. Since the advent of AI, all kinds of artists have seen work and jobs evaporate. In music, the writing of jingles for commercials—the traditional entry-level work for young musicians—has been automated out of existence almost overnight, while the number of jobs creating images fell by 35% in the months January 2022 to July 2023.[1]

Not surprisingly, artists are up in arms. The government consultation proposes three options:

· Doing nothing

· Strengthening copyright, requiring licenses in all cases.

· Allowing artists’ to opt out of their work being used for AI.

Doing nothing is not an option. Current copyright law is inadequate and the courts are swarming with costly lawsuits. Opting out is not an option either. To do so would turn copyright law on its head, requiring every artist to take steps to protect each individual work every time they make one. In place of an elegant and easily enforceable law, it proposes a clunky bureaucratic process for which there are no workable means of implementation or enforcement. So the choice should be simple: strengthen the copyright framework so that it can provide artists with fair remuneration for their work and a safe online environment where their work is protected.

But instead the argument is being framed by an inflammatory false binary: Either give the AI titans what they demand or the U.K. will lose the AI race. In parliament, Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology argued that it would be an economic and human rights disaster if “young people studying in colleges and universities around the country who aspire to work in technology as well” should have to “leave the country and work abroad in order to fulfil their potential”[1] just because artists clung to their right to legal protection. He acknoweldged that artists were ‘emotionally’ attached to their work but, basically, economics mattered more.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve spent my life in media and running technology businesses. The mindset which sees technology, engineering, mathematics and science as one kind of serious, disciplined, intelligent, valuable activity and the arts as frivolous, emotional, as some kind of peripheral, infantile activity could not be more wrong. The musician Soweto Kinch told me that it’s common for people to think of the arts as ‘a bit like dessert: unnecessary and probably bad for you.’ But artists, scientists, technologists themselves see this quite differently.

Artists aren’t afraid of uncertainty, they move towards it, just as scientists do, knowing that that is where new discoveries are to be found. Both know that doing so is risky, challenging and unpredictable—which is why they do it. They can handle complexity and ambiguity because that’s where new meaning, insight and invention is to be found. Both are excellent at innovation which requires all of these qualities. That all of this is difficult to do and to understand? Well, for artists, scientists and engineers alike, that’s the draw.

I’ve spent years working alongside musicians, writers, performers and visual artists and I’ve spent the last 2 years interviewing them about the creative process. These are some of the most disciplined, tough, courageous, insightful, fearless, resilient people in our society. They start work before being asked, show initiative and don’t quit when it gets hard. Driven by curiosity, they develop whatever new skills a new project demands. Trained to be self-critical, they are both imaginative and analytical.

Now look at the most recent World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report: Analytical thinking and creative thinking remained the most important skills for workers in 2023. In 2024, employers told Forbes that creative thinking is the most in-demand skill. The National Foundation for Educational Research studying the need for skills in 2035: “The six most vital ‘essential employment skills’, anticipated to be most in-demand by employers in the future, are; (1) communication, (2) collaboration, (3) problem-solving, (4) organising, planning & prioritising work, (5) creative thinking and (6) ‘information literacy’ (skills related to gathering, processing, and using information).” These are the skills artists deploy all the time. They are the skills that making art, of any kind at any level, develop in us all. And we need the whole ecosystem of the arts—the teachers, the libraries, the museums and concert halls—to keep them alive and growing in every aspect of our lives.

But in my current work with CEOs of large, global businesses, what I hear about the young, aspiring workforce is dismaying. ‘We hire well credentialed people, who had gone to good schools and universities and they are good at doing what they are told. Following instructions. But when we turn to them for creative thinking, they’re lost. It isn’t what they’ve learned. I’m not sure what we will be able to do with them when they’re 35.’ Everywhere I go the cry is for people who can think for themselves, come up with novel solutions, imagine different, better ways to get work done. I hear it in finance, in retail, in science, in, yes, tech.

This is what happens when you cut the arts and humanities out of the education system. When you denigrate it as ‘emotional’, discretionary, soft, indulgent. When you instigate multiple choice exams and criterion-based assessment, which grades an essay according to how closely it approximates to the ‘model’ answer. When you penalize students for imaginative responses to banal assignments. You get obedient, compliant people who have learned not to think for themselves. You lose creativity just at the moment it is needed most. That is the bigger economic and human rights failure the U.K. faces now.

And art is good for all of us. For young people, daily reading reduces hyperactivity and inattention and develops empathy. The same is true of dance, music or art lessons. For adults, frequent participation in the arts associated with less mental distress and happier lives—independent of background, income, medical history, demographics or personality. For the elderly, the arts seems to kick off, or perpetuate, a virtuous cycle. More involvement in the arts makes older people feel better, so they participate more. The consequence is fewer long and chronic diseases, a lower rate of depressive symptoms and obesity. And if all that is too emotional to be taken seriously, in the year September 2021-22, while the British economy grew at the rate of just 1.2%, the creative industries grew 6.9%. Imagine: an industry loved by buyers and sellers alike, that grows and benefits all other industries as well as society as a whole.

The technology sector depends on patents to protect its intellectual property rights. The cultural sector depends on copyright to do the same thing. This is not, should not be, a standoff. Both need each other. Both can flourish together. And we need more of both. This is a serious, not a multiple choice, question now. Not either/or but an opportunity to do both better.

Want to go deeper

If you would like to make a submission to the government consultation, more information can be found here.

If, like me, you find the protection of intellectual property strangely fascinating, you might want to read about Dickens’s struggle against U.S. publishers who published his books and paid him nothing. They sold A Christmas Carol for pennies. He wasn’t happy about it.

The Berne Copyright Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the first multilateral protection for artists, was signed by Belgium, France, Germany, Haiti, Italy, Liberia, Spain, Switzerland, Tunisia, and the United Kingdom in 1866. Today 180 countries are party to it. The United States joined in 1989.

For the beauty of it

I found this painting of New Hampshire by ee cummings in a Boston bookstore. Cummings did not think of himself as a poet but as what he called a poetandpainter. Another refusal to cede to binary simplicities.

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[1] https://www.ft.com/content/185e2e9d-2642-4b2b-b2e0-99751841b07a

[2] Today in Parliament, BBC Radio 4, 12 February 2025.