Is the creative industry fighting a losing battle against AI companies?

The creative industry in the United Kingdom has been locked in a battle with the government following proposed copyright reforms that could lead to loss of income from their proprietary assets. Filmmakers, authors, musicians, photographers, illustrators, and artists last week petitioned the UK government over the government’s plans to relax copyright laws to enable developers of artificial intelligence gain access to contents that are right protected for the training of AI.

Despite the opposition, the British House of Commons on Monday passed the reform bill, the Data (Use and Access) Bill, enabling the reforms to progress on the legislative journey. What the proposed reforms essentially sought is to grant UK AI developers unfettered access to copyrighted content, including music, films, books, photographs, illustrations, and artworks, for generative AI training. The government believes such reforms will engender an AI-friendly regulatory environment and help attract more investments into the country’s technology sector.

A vote against the UK copyright reforms

Creatives like musicians Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney of the Beatle fame, screenwriter Tom Stoppard, Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, and companies like Fox, Getty Images, Universal Music and others have kicked against the reforms. They see the plan as simply robbing Peter to pay Paul. Similar battles are ongoing in US courts between the creatives and AI developers over unauthorised mining or use of creative works for AI training.

To train AI models to see connections and patterns, developers require large data sets for mining. But the UK has some of the strictest policies on property rights and patents in the world. As a result, AI companies in the UK are struggling to access data for training their AI models. The struggle in turn is limiting AI investments in the UK. The proposed reforms thus aim to relax the country’s copyright laws and give AI companies access to the data they want. But at whose expense?

Given the reins to AI

What the policy will do is to give AI companies free access to works of musicians, photographers, writers, filmmakers, authors, and other creatives which are then used to train generative AI systems. Such AI models will no doubt eventually compete directly against the photographers, musicians, illustrators, and authors whose works were used for the training. Imagine an AI competing against an author. The AI has access to millions of content, including the author’s own writings, to reference while the author can only practicably reference fewer than 15-20 write ups during research. AI is scalable and superfast, able to churn out large volumes of quality written works in minutes while the author, no matter how prolific, will take days or weeks to write a book or two. It is a one-sided fight hence the opposition from content creators.

Last Monday, shortly before the votes in parliament, Elton John and others strongly condemned the move in a petition to the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. In the letter, Elton and co argued that “Creative copyright is the lifeblood of the creative industries. It recognises the moral authority we have over our work and provides an income stream for 2.4 million people across the four nations of the United Kingdom.” They wondered why the government is willing to decimate a sector that contributes over £126 billion yearly to the economy, create jobs and provide livelihood to 2.4 million UK citizens. They also argued that the government has no right in the first place to grant access to what it does not own, their works.

AI and global leadership

Generative AI’s transformative power is well known and tomorrow’s global leaders would be nations with strong AI capabilities. The UK cannot afford to lag behind, hence its willingness to sacrifice the creative industry. A UK government committee had warned that the UK “risks falling behind the advances in Artificial Intelligence made in the USA and China.” And called for “Britain to step up; to shape the AI revolution rather than wait to see how it shapes us.”

This is not the first time that the UK government will attempt to entice the AI industry using the country’s creative industry as a bait. In 2022, for instance, under the then Conservative government, the department charged with administering intellectual property rights, the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), had proposed a copyright exemption for text and data mining, similar to the European Union’s data-mining exception rule contained in the EU AI Act, to enable the expansion of the AI sector in the United Kingdom. That proposal was quickly shut down before it resurfaced last year.

How the UK situation will affect Nigeria

Beyond the UK however, the outcome of this battle and many others between AI companies and the creative industry across the world will have far reaching ramifications for not only creatives in the UK but globally, including in Nigeria. It would set a precedent on the interplay between content creators and AI companies. For now, that interplay hangs in the balance across the globe. For instance, there is an ongoing legal battle in the US between AI companies and the creative industry. The New York Times, the Authors Guild, and other creators had sued OpenAI and other AI companies for using their works to train their AI models without permission or compensation. In response, the tech companies argued ‘fair use’ in court.

Much of the income and wealth of the creative industry comes from royalties and other fees earned from their works. These earnings are made possible because of the guaranteed protection creators get on their works through copyright laws. Copyrights protect creators by ensuring that their contents are not illegally reproduced or distributed, enabling them gain economic reward for their works. Works by artistes like the King of Pop Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Elvis Presley, Whitney Houston, Fela Kuti, cartoonist Charles Schulz, and author Dr. Seuss continue to earn income for the estates of these creators who are long dead.

AI may wrestle market from creatives

AI has been touted to render some jobs redundant. It is becoming clear that it could also erode income streams for the creative industry. A traditional illustrator, for instance, who created some works may have to compete for market against another illustrator who uses AI to generate his illustrations. The AI illustrator is likely to have the edge considering that his illustrations will cost him less to produce and therefore better priced, he will certainly get to the market faster and with more illustrations than the traditional illustrator, and he may have better illustrations because the AI he used was trained using millions of illustrations, including the traditional illustrator’s previous works. It is a similar scenario for an author, a filmmaker, a musician, an artist, and other creatives.

The flipside of AI’s effect on the creative industry is that in the very near future it may be difficult for the creative industry to get copyright protections for its creations. US courts have ruled that creative works generated using AI cannot enjoy copyright protection.

Why it matters to Nigeria

For a country like Nigeria whose creative industry is experiencing a global purple patch over the past two decades, the UK copyright reforms and the AI legal cases in the US may have far reaching implications for content creators and the country. Nigerian music and films are widely consumed abroad, especially in the UK. Nigerian artistes earned $38 million in royalties on Spotify alone in 2024, doubled what they earned on the same platform in 2023. The UK reforms, if resolved in favour of AI companies, could affect these earnings. The contributions to Nigeria’s GDP of music, films, fashion, and other contents may conceivably take a nosedive. The industry contributed $5.6 billion (about N9.24 trillion) to the GDP in 2022. Another possible impact is that the government may struggle to transform the industry into a $100 billion one by 2030, as planned due to falling revenue as a result of AI.

Steps Nigeria must take to optimise opportunities

The UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has said of the copyright reforms “We’re not going back to square one. We are moving forward.” The Nigerian government must therefore start now to plan for the possible outcomes in the AI companies versus creative industry tussles. That should enable it develop comprehensive regulations that will mirror current realities and spur the growth of both industries in the country.