AI cannot be allowed to thrive at the expense of the UK’s creative industries

Journalism is under threat like never before. If that seems like hyperbole in relation to an industry which, admittedly, is sometimes prone to excitability and exaggeration, just consider that in 2023, some 8,000 journalists’ jobs were lost in the US and UK alone. Last year, it was 4,000 and so far, in 2025, the running tally is already above 900.

Those are the ones that are published. Almost certainly there are many more, beneath the radar. Those too, are the figures for only the US and UK. All over the world, they’re disappearing and with them entire news titles and platforms.

It’s not simply brands that are going. It’s coverage by trained, qualified, experienced professionals who know the difference between truth and a lie, who can spot a story of public interest, who report on wars and disasters and put their own lives on the line, who interview and pursue those in power and bring them to account. At a local level, they are sharing the details of courts, council goings-on, planning applications, events and changes that affect people’s everyday lives. Without them, there is nothing. Into that vacuum steps untruth and distortion. Instead of facts and hard evidence, conspiracy theories occupy the empty void. To quote The Washington Post’s famous mission statement: “Democracy dies in darkness”.

It was that newspaper that exposed the wrongdoings of the then US president Richard Nixon. It was why I became a journalist, because two men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were able to bring down the most powerful man in the world without firing a shot.

Woodward and Bernstein were human beings. They were not machines responding to code and algorithms. Similarly, all those people who tell us what actually happened, who put it in context and give it meaning, who shame those who peddle falsehoods and hypocrisy and want our vote, they too are human. Which is why it is so vital that human endeavour is not subsumed by a robot, why AI and those who make money from the new technology are not allowed to ride roughshod over journalism.

They must be forbidden from taking hard-won, expensively obtained, crafted editorial content for free as they feed the large language models on which AI is built. It cannot be permissible, as newspapers and others are arguing today via the News Media Association, for the AI profiteers to scrape creative words and pictures from the internet without permission, acknowledgement and payment.

The creative industries generate more than £120bn a year for the UK economy. This, for an economy, don’t forget, that has few world-beating pillars. Our creative industries and the individuals who work in them, the artists, authors, scriptwriters, photographers, designers, singers, copywriters and journalists, are one beacon in an otherwise gloomy landscape. We exploit and lose them at our collective peril.

The News Media Association’s “Make It Fair” campaign will highlight how creative content is at risk of being given away for free to AI companies because of a weakening of copyright laws.

I am old enough to have become a journalist when its exponents used typewriters. I was the first on my first trade magazine never to use one, I could deploy Alan Sugar’s just-launched Amstrad word processor. I remember as well, what it was like to be a journalist and not have the use of mobile phones. I can recall when Google became a thing.

It's easy to say that AI is simply another step along the way, that it’s merely continuing this evolution. It’s not. Unlike them, AI threatens wholesale job cuts and closures. Sure, some posts went because of previous advances but they were nothing like the numbers we will see in the future if the spread of AI goes unchecked, as those who profit from AI’s relentless march continue their sweet way.

In the end, there is another ultimate loser, which is AI itself. AI must be constantly fed; it relies on a diet of existing material. Then it can collate digest and dissect, working its magic at incredible speed to generate useable answers and solutions. But without that supply, it withers and becomes nothing. The smarter, more enlightened and long-term, possibly less greedy AI exponents should realise this. Pay for journalism properly, just as you pay your software technicians and developers and processor manufacturers, and AI will prosper.

It makes sense for everyone, AI and society included.

Chris Blackhurst is a former editor of The Independent