Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Jack Thorne wants undeclared AI in scripts prosecuted as fraud
Jack Thorne, president of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, told a London audience that some screenwriters are using prompts instead of writing, and he wants employers able to prosecute those who do not declare it.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Jack Thorne, president of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, said some people in his profession are using AI to cheat, and called for laws banning the secret use of the technology to generate scripts.
- He drew the line at replacement: discussion, spelling checks and layout help are fine, while using prompts instead of writing words is a failure to write at all.
- He said passing AI work off as your own should be unlawful, and that a company given undeclared AI-generated content should be entitled to prosecute the writer who supplied it.
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Why it matters
- decision A broadcaster or producer that takes up the proposal has to decide what its commissioning paperwork asks, who keeps the answer, and what a false one costs a writer's career.
- exposure The route Thorne describes makes the individual writer the party a company can prosecute, while the model developers whose scraping he attacks face nothing under it.
- contradiction He asks writers to be squeaky clean while arguing the models are built on stolen work, and he concedes that a writer-blaming rule gives studios and streamers cover.
- constraint Any employer writing policy this quarter is working from anecdote and a handful of executive conversations, with no measured prevalence to size the rule against.
A declaration clause has to name what it wants declared, and Thorne gave the two ends of the range. Discussing a problem, checking spelling, fixing layout: help. "I'm talking about using AI as a replacement for endeavour, as a replacement for writing at all. Using prompts instead of writing words," he said [3]. The speech did not say where between those ends an AI-drafted outline that a writer then rewrites would fall.
Both of the enforcement routes Thorne proposed sit with the buyer. "If you use AI to generate content and you do not declare it as such, then that is fraud and the companies you do it to should be entitled to prosecute you," he said [4]. He also said broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4 should threaten sanctions against those found to have used AI to generate their work [5]. His comparison was with academic plagiarism: expulsion threats for essays, professional consequences for scripts [6]. Either way it is the commissioning company that would have to ask the question and act on a false answer.
Thorne made the obvious objection to a writer-facing regime himself: that it lets the companies off. He warned that "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" [8]. His answer is that both fights run at once. Writers "need to be squeaky clean" in the face of models that "steal" the creative industry's work, he said [9], and he attacked the government for inaction over mass-scraping, saying ministers had been "a bit dazzled by tech" [10].
The two fights do not move at the same speed. A broadcaster or a producer can put a declaration into the next contract cycle. The copyright question is legislative: last year the government dropped a proposal that would have required artists and copyright holders to opt out of having their material fed into AI systems, after a backlash, and held a consultation instead [11]. A government spokesperson said: "Copyright laws must protect the UK's position as a creative powerhouse while unlocking the extraordinary potential of AI-driven innovation. We are doing the work that's required to get the right outcomes so both the creative and technical sectors can flourish in this country" [12]. Thorne said the way ministers act in the next five years "will define what the next hundred years looks like for every writer in this country" [13].
Thorne also said AI must not be allowed to impersonate actors, directors and writers [14].
On how widespread the cheating is, the record is one writer's account of his own conversations. Thorne said he had spoken to "a number of execs and studio heads" who gave "hugely different responses" about their use of AI, and that he had heard the same anecdotally from a few writers close to him [2]. By his account the people who would run a disclosure regime have not yet agreed a position on their own use of the tools.
What to watch
- Whether the BBC or Channel 4 writes an AI declaration into commissioning contracts, and what sanction attaches to a false answer.
- Whether the Writers' Guild of Great Britain proposes a disciplinary rule for members who pass off AI-generated text as their own.
- What the government's copyright consultation produces after ministers dropped the opt-out proposal.