UK AI Government Consultation Just 7 Days Left

This is just a reminder for anyone who reads the blog that those of us in the creative industries have until 25th of February to fill out their government consultation form on the proposed super duper mother of all AI plans.

Our Take On Why Do It?

AI, tech companies and, for the creative industries, particularly generative AI programmes trained on our work, are a big deal. They have the potential to disrupt our business and way of working, and we need safeguards so that this isn’t in a bad way that has a negative impact on livelihoods and creative output.

This is a human-wide problem but specifically in response to something the UK government is mooting, and there’s never a bad time to play our individual parts in democracy and civic society. So having individual voices heard is good.

Also, specific to the UK is a very stagnant economy and all the social ills that come with a lack of opportunity, money hoarding, low wages etc. So we need to be more engaged with politics now and not less, and even though a large number of people in recent popular surveys have said they would rather live in a dictatorship than a democracy, at the moment we still have a parliamentary democracy so we may as well participate.

What about Pudding Press Limited?

In terms of our output we are a human only publisher. We are not totally anti AI at all but we only publish human written books, or what on earth is the point!? We want to tell human stories and AI can’t help us with that.

In terms of generative AI, there are also important ethical concerns about a lot of this machine-made output being produced by scraping the Internet and riding on other people’s work. This helps to devalue and impoverish artists and writers, as well as feeding off Internet bias. This is a dystopian picture of publishing and one we don’t support.

You can currently find plenty of AI publishers on big online markets with a range of ebooks, or you can buy templates to adjust yourself on programmes like Canva and sell on. This is not the sort of publishing we were set up to do.

Of course we want a healthy UK arts industry, so our founder has already filled out a consultation, signed the petition and more. She also writes a Substack, which sometimes delves into AI, so you could read it for free if you want to know more.

What Can Writers, Illustrators, Publishers, Students and Arts Business People Do?

• Fill out the consultation if you have any business or professional experience that will be impacted by the government’s AI policy and plans. This requires a little time, some industry knowledge and is not for everyone. The idea is not to flood the system with low quality info but to try and influence the debate, so if that’s not you there are other options.

  
  

• Sign The Statement. Lots of famous and non-famous people are signing this and you don’t need any specialist knowledge, but this is where we can show our strength of feeling as an industry.

  
  

• Write to Your MP  Constituency MPs are there to represent their constituents’ interest in parliament, and they are theoretically beholden to do this.  You can write to your MP about any concerns or thoughts, and this also helps them to know what their constituents are thinking. They have an incentive to act if they want to get re-elected and many of the more progressive parties will also be open to hearing your opinion. In the case of this particular debate, you’ve lucked out if you have a Lib Dem or a Green, and many individual Labour and Conservative MPs will be open to hearing your thoughts.

  
  

In the meantime, there’s a lot more to this AI debate than on the surface and a lot more to come. The EU and the US have taken very different routes and the UK may not have exactly decided what to do yet but is currently following the US path.

In terms of protecting the arts, so far the EU discussions look the most robust, but we have no idea if they will amount to anything solid in the face of the financial dominance of the tech giants.  By protecting the arts we mainly mean jobs at this stage but there are many other facets to this.

In the meantime, we will continue to publish human work, so please buy books from us if you want to support this.