“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.”
Thorne was at pains to point out the ethical responsibility that lay on the shoulders of every single writer and the disastrous consequences that could befall the writing profession as a result of those who used AI to ‘cheat’. Thorne revealed to the room that he had had conversations with execs and studio heads – and fellow writers – who had told him they were aware of people cheating the system, using prompts to generate scripts. “If publishers, studios, streamers, can point to the writer as the problem, that gives them the excuse to behave however they’d like with content … ‘We have to use AI because you guys are’.”
Thorne said he foresaw, in the next five years, sustained “incursions” into the writing profession: the replacement of script reading with animatics; the routine use of AI to generate ideas; the death of the rewrite; and, potentially, the replacement of the writer themselves, or that “a more limited version of us becomes possible”, which leads to the biggest problem of all – the death of the development of the future writer.
“Andy Burnham … wants a diverse Britain, which caters to the local … We at the WGGB want writers who tell stories about our country, we want this generation to be truly empowered … and we need his help to ensure it … If we do not have a wide variety of people telling stories – in all mediums – about who they are and what they care for then we will shrink as a country both economically and culturally. AI, in its current form, is a shrinking tool. And it doesn’t need to be. We do not wish to be shrunk.”
Singling out award-winning writer and actress Michaela Coel as an example, he continued, “I, like many, think her show I May Destroy You was a profound revolutionary event.” He spoke about her remarkable emergence – her show Chewing Gum Dreams went from fringe London theatre – the Yard – to the National Theatre’s temporary space – to Channel 4’s E4, where it became the comedy drama Chewing Gum. “Chewing Gum is seen as yielding an exciting new voice, and the BBC commission I May Destroy You. Every stage of that process required investment, investment from actors, directors, designers, producers and enthusiasts. If a Michaela Coel script can be digitally created, then that investment becomes less interesting. If Michaela Coel can be scraped and those scrapes can be used to create shadows of her work, can be used to create a Michaela Coel substitute, then the investment in the next Michaela Coel becomes less likely.”
Thorne went on to lay out a number of potential solutions, from his perspective “as a practitioner”, listing five points:
- Full transparency. Stronger intervention from Government was essential, said Thorne. “Big tech “steal, but because they don’t have to declare where they stole from, the stealing goes unpunished.” The Government’s AI Labelling Taskforce is due to announce its findings this autumn which “will apparently provide creators with clear technical tools to identify if their intellectual property has been used … We need mandatory data sets in which developers publish audited summaries of every input that has led to their outputs.”
- The texts that are used need to generate a cost. “These costs need to be large enough that generating ideas through machines isn’t necessarily cheaper than generating ideas through humans.”
- A clear change to fraud legislation to prohibit passing AI work off as your own. “I do not think using AI to check your spelling and sense should be [illegal],” Thorne said, “but if you use AI to generate content and you do not declare it as such then that is fraud.” He said that a change in the law was necessary “to protect the most vulnerable …. As writers, what we are is what we make, and both the law and our industry should be absolutely crystal clear on that.”
- AI cannot be allowed to impersonate. “I asked Gemini to write a script in the style of Craig Mazin, no other prompts just that, it did and it wasn’t good but there were aspects of his writing I recognised,” explained Thorne. “I asked ChatGPT to write a Channel 4 pitch for a show from me – disappointingly that was pretty good, but that may say more about my writing and choices than AI. This should be prohibited.”
- Just as the Government has created an AI Security Institute, so it should create a Copyright Institute. “A regulatory body that monitors and regulates AI expansion and suggests Government intervention, if necessary, in the market,” explained Thorne, who added that for writing this could include changes to the BBC Charter, looking at support for lower budget dramas, looking at regional theatres and how best to support their new writing output, and other interventions in the creative arts.
Thorne concluded: “This requires Government leadership. In fact, it requires our Government to take global leadership … Of course, there will be pushback from certain economies, in all probability the American Government won’t like aspects of it, but surely – surely – this sector is worth, to quote our new Prime Minister, some political capital …
‘We have no alternative but to…’ is the one of the worst phrases in politics, and it is going to be brought into the creative industries if we do not do more to stop this. If we cannot police our profession, if we are not given the ability to police our profession, then practices are going to result which are going to lead to the partial destruction of this profession.”
Thorne’s speech was followed by a Q&A discussion with Baroness Beeban Kidron, a leading voice on digital regulation and an expert consultant on AI.