‘Writers are facing our moment of enclosure – we must fight the destruction of our profession’

“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,” said Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) President and award-winning writer Jack Thorne, addressing an audience at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall yesterday evening (Sunday 13 September 2026) for an event on Authorship in the Age of AI.

Making a direct appeal to the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham (a former Culture Secretary, and self-confessed advocate for the creative industries), Thorne said that “I am absolutely certain the next five years and the way that Government acts or doesn’t act to protect our sector will define what the next hundred looks like for every writer in this country.”

Thorne admitted that “If harnessed correctly … AI will bring advances to science and the economy… But the harm it produces could outweigh that benefit if we believe that the current modellers are entitled to behave however they like for the furtherment of their technology”. He spoke about the industrial-scale theft/scraping of writers’ work to train Large Language Models without consent or payment (in breach of existing UK copyright law) and tech companies spending millions on second-hand books for this purpose, plus numerous copyright cases against big tech companies in the States. “These language models are in an arms race with each other … and are intent on getting stronger,” he said. “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. They are working at speed and with great intelligence on their side.”

To read the full article on writersguild.org.uk, click here