We need to stand up for the creative industries in the face of the AI onslaught

Back in 2010, before he helped usher in a brutal period of austerity blamed for causing 200,000 excess deaths, Nick Clegg was just another harmless Lib Dem leader. In pre-Brexit Britain where the three main political parties nuzzled the same centre ground, Nick was (a bit) different, a breath of fresh air. Both Gordon Brown and David Cameron fell over themselves to associate with him in a memorable TV debate in the run-up to that year’s election. “I agree with Nick!” they both hyperventilated in near-unison and the country nodded along in agreement. 

Sadly, that was the height of Nick’s popularity. After the election he was appointed Cameron’s deputy prime minister, quickly abandoning his party’s pledge to scrap university tuition fees in a betrayal of the thousands of students who voted for him. After losing his seat in 2017, Nick joined Facebook, a move he must’ve known was unlikely to win back that long-gone popularity, although the reported £2.8m salary would’ve helped take the edge off. 

Nick left Facebook (now known as Meta) earlier this year having spent the best part of a decade shilling for a company which has helped subvert democracy, provided a platform for the livestreaming of terrorism, and buried internal research showing its products increased anxiety and depression among teenagers and made a significant proportion of them suicidal.  

Having sold nearly £15m worth of Meta shares before announcing his departure, you might have thought Nick would be happy to call it a day, go offline, quit public life altogether. But he’s back – this time defending the AI behemoths who want to scrape the internet of all that’s good in their never-ending pursuit of algorithmic excellence.  

Speaking at an event to promote his new book, Nick said asking for artists’ consent before using their work as fodder for machine learning would “basically kill” the AI industry. “I just don’t know how you go around asking everyone first,” Nick said. “I just don’t see how that would work.” On Bluesky, the refuge for those who have fled the X/Twitter hellscape, the response was withering: “‘Without widespread theft, my industry can’t survive’ is an argument against your industry surviving, and not an argument for allowing widespread theft,” one user succinctly put it. 

In Nick’s defence, his position is not all that different from our government whose idea of AI regulation is not to have any. Earlier this month, MPs voted down a Lords amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill which would have required AI companies to disclose their use of copyright-protected material. Data protection minister Chris Bryant said many would consider it an “apocalyptic moment” but he assured them it really wasn’t.  

The pace at which AI has become embedded in our workplaces, our entertainment, our children’s education is startling. What was once a hypothetical threat is now a real and present danger for many industries and jobs, while also offering exciting possibilities for technological advancement.  

And yet just as successive governments failed to properly regulate the internet and the scourge of social media, so too are those behind AI being given the keys to the kingdom, free to take whatever they want in the hope they can help stimulate economic growth. But some things are worth fighting for. We need to protect our creative industries from the politicians who seek to sell them out. Surely even Nick can agree with that.