Lee Barron

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Frith) on securing such an important debate. To me, it is about culture, creativity and human talent, and about people reaching their full potential in life and making sure that that is not taken away from them by things that can happen. This morning, I hosted a drop-in with Equity, and I met the Association of Photographers. They are worried, and rightly so: 58% of Association of Photography members say that they have already lost work to AI. That is more than £14,000 on average already lost by each professional photographer. That is not work going; that is work being taken by generative AI. More than 15 billion AI-generated images are out there now, trained by using people’s intellectual property without permission, payment or those people even knowing. Photographers post their pictures on their websites, then AI companies send in web crawlers to scrape them—no consent, no warning. That is data theft, plain and simple. It breaks data protection laws, and we should call it out for what it is, because once scraped, they are gone—people cannot retrieve their property. We would not allow that in any other sector—it is not right. We would not let someone steal our tools, so why would we let them steal our work, our face or our voice? That is robbery. Actors are finding their faces and voices turning up in ads and games that they never agreed to. AI watches people work and copies them. No one should lose their job and their creative talent to a machine that is trained on their own work—it is your face, it is your voice, it is your style, and it should be your choice. Consent must come first—no yes, no use. Let us fix this. Let us give working people the rights they need in the AI age. We have copyright law for a reason, so let us update and strengthen it. Tech companies cannot just take—there must be rules and no opt-outs. There have to be protections and there has to be fair pay. Protect our artists, our voices and our jobs. This is not science fiction; it is happening right now, and we need to act now before irreparable damage is done.