Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been told that he has a choice between supporting the UK’s creative industries and gambling everything on AI.
Getty Image CEO Craig Peters made the comments amid pressure from the creative sector around media materials being harvested for training data by AI companies.
Peters said: “When I look at the UK, probably about 10% of its GDP is sitting in the creative industries, whether that’s movies, television.”
“I think that making that trade-off is risky. If I’m in the UK, betting on AI, less than a quarter point of GDP in the UK today, significantly less than the creative industries, is a bit of a perplexing trade-off.”
The comments came after an Intellectual Property Office consultation sparked anger in 2023 after setting out plans to help AI users overcome barriers to copyright.
This led to anger among image organisations who operate global image libraries.
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However others have expressed that they anticipate that AI will be crucial to the sector’s development.
“The AI boom isn’t slowing down any time soon and, for the creative industries, that means we either embrace it or get left behind,” said Inspired Thinking Group deputy CEO John Kirk.
He added: “Understandably, the rapid pace of change has brought up concerns among the sector, especially with regards to being used for training data, but the reality is that tools such as generative AI can greatly ease the burden on creatives.”
He continued raising that the demand for content “is only going to increase” and highlighted that AI offers “a new approach to content delivery, working side-by-side
Deployteq CEO Sjuul van der Leeuw added: “It is not a case of creative industries versus Generative AI, they should work alongside eachother to unlock the power of creatives.”
