AI firms are ‘scraping the value’ from UK’s £125bn creative industries, says Channel 4 boss
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/01/ai-firms-scraping-value-uk-creative-industries-says-channel-4-boss-alex-mahon
Posted by F0urLeafCl0ver
AI firms are ‘scraping the value’ from UK’s £125bn creative industries, says Channel 4 boss
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/01/ai-firms-scraping-value-uk-creative-industries-says-channel-4-boss-alex-mahon
Posted by F0urLeafCl0ver
12 Comments
AI should be banned. But rich business owners won’t allow it
What about streaming services? That has had a negative impact on television programmes.
Let’s take Red Dwarf for an example. They were meant to be filming a new series this year but that got scrapped because there is not enough money in the television industry. The reason given was the above
What can you do? The UK cannot legislate worldwide. Write a law here and the scraping will just happen elsewhere.
“creative industry, which generates £125bn in gross value added (GVA)”
Most of the “creative industry” is IT. Ironically.
What a load of protectionist tripe. That value equally belongs to the consumers who paid for it. Allowing our ai models to learn and grow from it will benefit those consumers immeasurably more than allowing those companies to lock away that value. Especially considering the amount of open source that is happening in the space.
> Critics of the government’s opt-out proposal, issued in a consultation that closed in February, argue that it is unfair and impractical.
The creative industries had absolutely no problem using opt-out cookie consents.
How is this different from Quentin Tarantino watching a movie and then being influenced by it in creating his own movies, which have made him millions of dollars?
The generative AI industry continues to have no clear path to profitability, and the only companies making any money through it are those supplying the infrastructure. I’m surprised that’s the industry the government is putting its support behind here.
who said, its a level playing field ?
when a mediocre actor can earn more than nurse, doctor, teacher, policeman and soldier combined, it does not warrant my sympathy
AI companies get away with so much copyright infringement for no good reason. Not to mention they are essentially steam rolling the average creative.
The average earnings for a British author is 7k. It used to be 12k. It’s just going to get worse as ai is allowed to run riot through creative industries.
It boggles my mind that you have an industry worth 125bn and you will decimate it on the altar of high tech that benefits no one.
Its scraping everywhere. You’ll find costs have having a site go up within last year due to META and other AI crawlers everywhere.
People need to move to something like Cloudflare’s AI blocking plus “AI Labyrinth”