Jack Thorne warns AI could ‘destroy’ writers

Adolescence writer Jack Thorne has warned that AI could destroy the writing profession and urged the government to take urgent action to protect against the proliferating tech.

Delivering a speech at the Southbank Centre yesterday (13 September), the writer and president of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) suggested politicians are floundering as big tech companies “work at speed and with great intelligence on their side”.

“The government is staring at AI with eyes wider than Bugs Bunny. It doesn’t know what it is. It doesn’t know whether to run towards it or run away. It doesn’t know whether it’s the future of our country’s economy or a massive destructive force,” he said.

“We must fight the destruction of our profession.”

Thorne, who is also behind BBC1’s Lord of the Flies adaptation and Channel 4’s Falling, urged for rapid action to prevent AI modellers from behaving “however they like”. His particular concern is the illegal scraping of writers’ work to train large language models, which is taking place on “an industrial scale” without consent or payment. Tech giants are spending millions on second-hand books for this purpose, he claimed.

Actionable measures the government should enforce, he suggested, include a change to fraud legislation to prohibit AI from impersonating creators, and from passing AI work off as your own, as well as the establishment of a Copyright Institute – a regulatory body that monitors and regulate AI expansion.

Thorne also suggested creators should be provided with clear technical tools to identify if their IP has been used.

“Big tech [companies] steal, but because they don’t have to declare where they stole from, the stealing goes unpunished,” he said.

“These language models are in an arms race with each other and are intent on getting stronger. I have spoken to people inside the machine who’ve told me the worst excesses in tech are encouraged and led by the idea that whatever they’re doing, the other side are doing worse.”

Without intervention, Thorne believes the tech will be routinely used to generate TV ideas in the next five years, and that human writers will either be replaced entirely or “a more limited version” of them used.

“If Michaela Coel can be scraped and those scrapes can be used to create shadows of her work, can be used to create a Michaela Coel substitute, then the investment in the next Michaela Coel becomes less likely,” he warned.

“If we do not have a wide variety of people telling stories – in all mediums – about who they are and what they care for then we will shrink as a country both economically and culturally. AI, in its current form, is a shrinking tool. And it doesn’t need to be. We do not wish to be shrunk.”

Jack Thorne: Authorship in the Age of AI, in association with the WGGB, was delivered as part of Creative Intelligence at the Southbank Centre.