Generative artificial intelligence (GenAl) is heralded as the next industrial revolution: promising an age of innovation, limitless productivity and economic growth.
But such change comes at a cost: the industrial-scale theft of the UK’s cultural riches. How do we protect and support our artists and creative industries, whilst technology progresses at lightning speed?
Brave New World? Justice for creators in the age of GenAI, a major study of GenAI’s impact on creative work, calls on the government to immediately implement CLEAR, a new regulatory framework to protect the livelihoods of authors, illustrators, musicians, performers, and photographers, or risk the decimation of the UK’s £124.6 billion creative industries sector.
The report uses evidence from over 10,000 creators and is published by the Society of Authors (SoA), the Independent Society of Musicians (ISM), Equity, the Association of Illustrators (AOI), and the Association of Photographers (AOP). It reveals the erosion of creators’ bread-and-butter work in an increasingly AI-driven world.
The findings are stark, showing creators losing income and jobs and having their work stolen across every creative discipline. Key findings include:
- 99% of creators say their work has been scraped without consent
- One in three creative jobs already lost to GenAI
- A third 32% of illustrators report lost commissions or cancelled projects due to GenAI
Authors are also hard hit:
- 86% of authors say GenAI has already reduced their earnings
- 72% of authors say job opportunities have already been cut
- 57% of authors say their career is no longer sustainable
- 43% of literary translators and 37% of SoA illustrators saw earnings fall due to GenAI
- 26% of illustrators and 36% of literary translators report cancelled or redirected commissions
The trade associations behind this report call on government to set a global standard for ethical, human-centred GenAI deployment, with the implementation of a new CLEAR regulatory framework for GenAI consisting of:
C – Consent first: clarify the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) to ensure creators’ works cannot be used to train GenAI models with explicit, prior consent
L – Licensing, not scraping: support a statutory licensing scheme for AI training that provides a lawful, transparent route for AI developers to access creative works, ensuring fair payment and attribution to creators
E – Ethical use of training data: create enforceable ethical standards for the sourcing, curation and application of training data
A – Accountability: about which copyright-protected works have been used, how they were obtained and whether they influenced outputs.
R – Remuneration and Rights: creators’ work should be attributed and paid for.
The CLEAR framework reflects what creators are asking for, not a rejection of technology, but clear rules that allow innovation to develop in a way that respects their creative work.
Read the report
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