Most UK writers believe AI will reduce their income

According to the Writers Guild of Great Britain, 65% of respondents to a recent survey said they believed that the increased use of AI will reduce their income from writing, whilst 61% were worried that AI could replace jobs in their craft areas.

This comes on top of an early impact assessment by OpenAI which indicated that the exposure risk to poets, lyricists and creative writers was amongst the highest, at 68.8%. Moreover, a recent report by KPMG, “Generative AI and the UK Labour Market,” estimates that 43% of the tasks associated with authors, writers and translators could be automated, with humans “fine tuning” machine output.

In response, WGGB has today published “Writers and AI: A policy position statement” outlining the challenges caused by AI and the risks that go with it, as well as the potential benefits of AI to the writing profession – such as its use in detecting copyright infringements.

Current concerns about AI identified in Writers and AI include decreased job opportunities for writers, the suppression of writer pay, infringements of copyright, and the use of writers’ work without their permission, plus lack of adequate regulation from the government. At the same time, 81% of respondents to the WGGB survey felt that writers should be paid a fee when their work is used by AI systems.

“WGGB believes that while AI systems are not yet sophisticated enough to accurately mimic the standard of writing produced by professional writers this is a likely future scenario. However, the union does not believe that AI will ever be able to match the originality, authenticity, enthusiasm and humanity that professional writers put into their storytelling,”  the Writers Guild of Great Britain said. “WGGB also believes that, if used in an ethical, transparent and responsible way, there are potential benefits – including allowing writers to diversify and increase their income streams and sustain a writing career,”  the union added.

The Writers Guild of Great Britain also issued a series of recommendations for the future. For example, the union said that AI developers should only use writers’ work if they have been given express permission to do so – reflecting the view of 80% of respondents to the WGGB survey –, or that AI developers should maintain clear and accessible logs of the information used to train their tool to allow writers to check if their work has been used – reflecting 82% of survey respondents who said developers should be transparent about what data they have used in creating AI systems, including where they have used writers’ work.