Getty boss warns Sunak against ‘risky’ trade-off between AI and UK creative industries
Rishi Sunak could be making a “risky” and “perplexing” trade-off if he decides to throw government weight behind artificial intelligence (AI) instead of backing the UK’s creative industries, the chief executive of Getty Images has warned.
Craig Peters said the Prime Minister must decide whether to bet big on AI at the expense of the UK’s creative industries, which he reckons makeup around 10 per cent of the UK’s GDP.
“I think making that trade-off is risky,” said Peters, who has led Getty since 2019. “If I’m the UK, betting on AI, less than a quarter point of GDP within the UK today, significantly less than the creative industries, is a bit of a perplexing trade-off,” he told the Guardian.
According to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Britain’s creative industries have been growing at more than 1.5 times the rate of the wider economy over the past decade, contributing £108bn in gross value added (GVA) annually.
Last summer, the government announced plans to further boost the creative industries by £50bn and create a million more jobs by 2030.
Getty has created its own generative AI model alongside Nvidia, trained only on its own licensed images. Peters said he thinks this partnership proves that AI models can coexist with a licence requirement.
“You need to take different tacks, different approaches, but the notion that there isn’t the capability to do that, that’s just smoke,” he explained.
His comments come amid a surge in lawsuits against AI companies, including Getty’s legal action against Stability AI, the creator of image-generator Stable Diffusion. The lawsuit alleges the unlawful ‘scraping’ of Getty’s images, with some output even bearing traces of the company watermark.
In the US, The New York Times is suing ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using its news stories as part of the training data for their AI systems.
OpenAI fired back, saying the publisher does not “meaningfully” contribute to the training of its models and it is “impossible” to make tools like ChatGPT without accessing copyrighted material.
In 2023, the UK government outlined its goal to address barriers faced by AI firms in using copyrighted material, committing to support AI companies in accessing copyrighted work for their models.
This marked a step back from an earlier proposal for a broad copyright exception for text and data mining, which several MPs slated.
A Department for Science, Innovation and Technology spokesperson said: “The government wants the UK to be a world leader in AI innovation whilst continuing to support our thriving creative industries. We will take a balanced and pragmatic approach to the use of AI across this sector, which allows AI innovators and our world-leading creators to continue to flourish.
“We continue to work closely with stakeholders to understand the impact AI has on broadcasters, publishers and creative businesses.”