Some may say that we are sleepwalking into dictatorships around the world. All the signs are there: truth is questioned, legal structures attacked, conspiracy theories flourish and trust in the democratic system is at its lowest point. All you need under such circumstances is a willing dictator and a complacent population for autocracy to succeed.

The publishing and agency world may be sleepwalking into its own dangerous and dark period. Not so much a democratic threat as a cultural act of suicide. Under the banner of ‘How can you stop progress?’, we are being invited to reward the companies who stole our authors’ work by doing deals with those very same companies.

We all know that AI is here to stay and will bring real improvements to the lives of millions in healthcare and elsewhere. We have all heard the many arguments that AI can improve and will improve our systems of editorial, marketing, distribution, design and the way we work and relate to one another. Speed and efficiency is needed. Nobody who has used a spellcheck can deny the advantages of enhanced tools on our desktop.

Yet these new tools come at a big price and present an existential question for those involved in the job of protecting copyright. How can we stop what has already begun and was taken without our permission? How do we regain the footing that we lost when our authors’ material was scraped off the internet and fed into training machines that now allow for the advances that many applaud?

Well, we fight. We don’t sleepwalk into a period where we may well lose the very thing that brings value to the entire ecosystem – the written word by the author.

The current government consultation on copyright and AI is very weak and does not address any of the safeguards needed to protect authors’ work. There is a useful email template on the website of the Creative Rights in AI Coalition – a group that has more than 75 members from businesses and organisations across the creative industries, including the Publishers Association, Pan Macmillan, Booksellers Association, Association of Authors’ Agents and the Society of Authors – that you could use to message your local MP, and which I urge you to sign.

If we don’t set the ground rules now, we will never regain any moral or commercial control

Unless AI-generated fiction and non-fiction is clearly labelled as such, unless AI attributes and pays for its sources, and unless AI involves human input at a deep level, we must fight it. If we don’t set the ground rules now, we will never regain any moral or commercial control. It is not enough to sit on the side and hope this goes away. As the great Philip K Dick (who knew a thing or two about future worlds) wrote: “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.”

We should get all parties to sign up to a few basic principles that will protect copyright, image rights, voice talent, bespoke designs and a multitude of other areas. These would include:

• All AI altered, enhanced or created (partially or fully) content should be clearly labelled so everyone knows where it comes from. Pretty similar to GM foods.
• The underlying rights derived from the creativity or image of a creative talent must be owned by the creator with the power to lease or sell those rights with full freedom and authority.
• No organisation has the right to take the image, creative talent or copyright without permission and that permission should not be obscured by an ‘opt-out’ only option.

Of course, there will be a number-one, bestselling novel that is purely AI generated and we will all talk about it and bewail (again) the death of the novel. But it will herald a period of disruption so catastrophic for the creative industry that we will forget this simple, inalienable truth: that all creativity comes from humans who have either lived or imagined extraordinary worlds, not a programme that has recycled older ideas and juggled words around.