Creative Industries

Alison Hume Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alison Hume (Scarborough and Whitby) (Lab)]

The creative industries are rightly a priority for our Government, and I warmly welcome the Minister’s speech, as will our creatives in the coastal communities of Scarborough and Whitby. Having been a screenwriter by trade, I declare my membership of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. This has been a fascinating debate, and I rise to ask whether, in our headlong rush to embrace the white heat of scientific revolution, we are at risk of extinguishing the spark of original human creativity. Sparks were indeed flying in the 1982 cult sci-fi film “Blade Runner”; Ridley Scott drew upon the landscape where he grew up—the flaring oil stacks of the refineries in the north-east, sending up big fireballs of gas—to create a dystopian future world where humans battle synthetic humans known as replicants.

As we move into a future where artificial intelligence is no longer the stuff of sci-fi films but the tool that will revolutionise our lives, we should pause to ensure that we safeguard our original content creators, because unless we tighten copyright laws around intellectual property to protect creators, AI data mining will stem the flow of creative content. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) mentioned, the AI systems that mine content to gain artificial intelligence could run out of new material in the next few years—this is known as model collapse—and generative AI models could start training on their own low-quality outputs. To return to “Blade Runner”, the replicants would be breeding with the replicants.

To enjoy a future that protects human creativity, we should reform the UK text and data mining regime to place the onus on GAI firms to seek permission from rights holders to use their original published work. Amendments tabled by Baroness Kidron to the Data (Use and Access) Bill, which will be discussed shortly in the other place, offer meaningful transparency provisions that would make the UK’s gold-standard copyright regime enforceable and counter the widespread theft of intellectual copyright by AI companies. The amendments chime with public opinion, and I ask the Minister to reflect on whether the Government will support them.

I finish with dialogue from “Blade Runner”—words spoken by the replicant Roy Batty:

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

We must act to protect our creative talent in the UK—the screenwriters who wrote those unforgettable lines, and all future writers. In the fight to win the battle for intellectual copyright, surely we must be on the side of the human, not the replicant.