The single biggest threat to the livelihood of authors and, by extension, to our culture, is not short attention spans. It is AI.
The UK publishing industry – worth more than £11bn, part of the £126bn that our creative industries generate for the British economy – has sat by while big tech has “swept” copyrighted material from the internet in order to train their models. Recently, the AI startup Anthropic settled a $1.5bn copyright case over this issue, but the ship has undeniably left the harbour and big tech is sailing off with the goods.
