All 2.4m of Britain's creative workers are at risk -- and we know why (The Times)

[highplainsdem]

https://www.thetimes.com/culture/film/article/ai-creative-industries-acting-art-jobs-risk-l29hvgjdx

All 2.4m of Britain’s creative workers are at risk — and we know why
A new report into the impact of AI on the creative sector makes for apocalyptic reading. The government must act now

Richard Morrison
Friday January 30 2026, 12.01am GMT, The Times


For several years the people in Britain’s creative sector — writers, musicians, artists, actors, photographers and so on — have been howling about the theft of their work by the tech giants developing generative AI (GenAI). So far the outcry has been fruitless. The tech giants have carried on “scraping” original work (that is, training their machines to digest it at lightning speed) with insouciant disdain for copyright laws. Meanwhile, successive UK governments have acted with all the decisiveness of paralysed rabbits caught in the headlights of a thundering juggernaut.

-snipping a paragraph calling this one of the greatest acts of theft in history-

Over the top? It’s hard to feel that after you have seen the startling figures in the report. Titled Brave New World? Justice for Creators in the Age of GenAI, and published by five trade organisations (the Independent Society of Musicians, Equity, the Society of Authors, the Association of Illustrators and the Association of Photographers), it effectively shows that the wrecking-ball impact of GenAI on the arts, media, design, publishing and entertainment worlds is not something to worry about tomorrow. It’s happening already.

Using evidence from 10,000 of their members, the organisations claim that a third of all creative jobs have already been lost to AI; that 99 per cent of their members believe their own work has been scraped without consent; that three quarters of all musicians say unregulated GenAI threatens their livelihoods; that a third of the UK’s illustrators and more than half its writers have seen commissions lost because of GenAI; and that actors and voice artists are already seeing work snatched away by AI-generated clones such as Tilly Norwood, launched last year amid claims that this simpering virtual entity could be “the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman”.

In other words, the report argues, the UK creative industries — which contributed £125 billion to the economy in 2024 and supported 2.4 million jobs — are being destroyed by an AI sector that, whatever its long-term potential, contributed just £11 billion in the same year and supported only 85,000 jobs.

-snip-

[WSHazel]

1. Much of AI is just plagiarism.

It is simply regurgitating content that it has in its databases. It is more search engine than actual intelligence.