UK Capitulation to Big Tech Betrays Creators Everywhere

Big tech’s theft of creative work is not inevitable, it is a political choice. Britain must stand with artists, not surrender to Silicon Valley.

When Peter Kyle, the UK’s Secretary for Science, Innovation and Technology, sat down for an interview on Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s Leading podcast, we finally got to hear a senior UK Government figure discuss the future of artificial intelligence and Britain’s creative sector. What emerged was not a vision for responsible innovation, but something far more alarming: a declaration of surrender to the world’s most powerful tech companies.

Photo by Michael & Diane Weidner on Unsplash

As I have previously argued in When the Mask Slips and Big Tech’s Empire of Extraction, the real question is not whether AI will change the economy (it already has), but whether governments have the courage to set and enforce rules that protect creators and the public.

Kyle openly admits that AI companies have already scraped the work of authors, musicians, filmmakers, artists and photographers to train their models, without consent or compensation. His tone is not one of outrage, but of resignation. “All of the data that people are worried about has already been scraped and used by AI companies.”

It turns the basic concept of government responsibility on its head: sorry chaps, the theft has already occurred so we all just have to accept it.

What Kyle is really proposing is something worse: that artists should give charity to the world’s richest corporations as they run away with the profits. Are we really meant to view Silicon Valley platforms through the lens of charity? Meta last week projected that it would generate up to US$1.4 trillion from its AI technologies by 2035.

It’s maddening that I have to type this: Trillion-dollar companies are not struggling start-ups. They do not need our generosity. They need regulation.

In a bizarre and ironic way, the whole thing mirrors another national scandal: the dumping of raw human sewage into Britain’s rivers and coastlines. Politicians have become inert and shrugged at the pollution in the same way Kyle shrugs at the looting of the nation’s creative industries. He’s raised the white flag already: the damage is already done, so we must simply live with the consequences.

This is a profound betrayal of Britain’s entire cultural sector, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what leadership demands. As an Australian, I am not an outsider looking in. I am one of many who work within and rely upon the architecture of copyright laws that originated in the UK.

The UK’s legal traditions have served as a foundation stone for creative rights and protections across the Commonwealth and beyond. The world has looked to Britain not only for cultural output, but for the legal frameworks that protect that artistic creation.

That is why the attitude of the UK on AI theft of cultural IP matters. What Britain chooses to do will likely shape how other governments respond. The UK’s decisions send signals that reverberate through parliaments, legislative chambers and industry negotiations worldwide. This must be a moment of global leadership, not a shrug from an increasingly inward-looking, post-Brexit Britain.

Are we seriously to believe that the country that gave us the Statute of Anne, created the BBC, and exported Shakespeare, punk and Paddington Bear to the world now thinks creativity is just raw material for Californian billionaires to strip mine?

Kyle claims that Britain cannot act because AI companies are not domiciled in the UK. “Unless you have international copyright attached to your work, which is respected in California, then your data has already been subsumed into the AI system.”

This argument collapses under a millisecond of scrutiny. Britain regulates countless global industries every day. Foreign banks, pharmaceutical giants, airlines and countless other importers all accept domestic rules when operating within UK borders. If Britain can regulate the behaviour of Wall Street banks or European airlines, it can certainly insist that AI companies operating in Britain respect the intellectual property rights of British artists. Pretending otherwise is either naïvety or the repetition of Big Tech talking points.

Worse still, Kyle then attempts to paint himself as a reluctant referee between two vital sectors. “We have the second largest creative arts sector in the world. We have the third largest AI market in the world. And what I’m being asked to do is to choose between one or the other.”

Framing this as a zero-sum game isn’t just a failure of leadership, it’s complete capitulation. The real task of leadership is to ensure that innovation and creativity can coexist, not by allowing one sector to cannibalise the other, but by setting clear, enforceable rules that uphold consent, respect and fair dealing.

And like the effluent floating down rivers and along British beaches, it gets worse. Kyle’s entire argument rests on the idea that Britain must appease big tech because we “need” them. He claims, “the only way that we can have influence over them is to have them here.”

This is the rhetoric of hostage negotiation, not policy making. Governments are not meant to serve monopolies. They are meant to defend their peoples’ rights, property and dignity. Accepting Silicon Valley’s terms is not inevitable. It is a choice, and it is one that will weaken Britain’s economy, undermine its legal system and betray its cultural future. It will be the next chapter of Britain’s falling relevance in the world.

Kyle insists that he is “with Macca, with Elton John, with Stephen Fry” in spirit. Cute asides mean little when followed by policies that actively greenlight the exploitation of the very people he claims to champion. He talks of setting “red lines” after a consultation process, but by conceding so much ground in advance, accepting the scraping of British work as an immovable fact, he is effectively announcing that any future protections will be too little, too late.

Britain’s creative economy is one of the country’s great strategic advantages, a source of jobs, exports, soft power and national pride. To see it hollowed out to satisfy the appetites of a handful of Californian monopolies is shocking.

AI can deliver extraordinary benefits. But it must be built on principles of consent, credit and the rule of law. Innovation without respect for rights is not progress. It is exploitation.

Kyle’s comments expose a political culture that has learned nothing from past failures to confront powerful industries. Britain, and the world, deserve better than a politics of helplessness. It deserves leaders willing to set the terms of engagement, not with empty promises, but with real, enforceable protections.

The alternative is a future where creativity is nothing more than feedstock for machines, and rights are dismissed as quaint relics of a more democratic, more creative and fairer age. And the UK will truly become just a little Britain soon to export little ideas.