Chris Evans

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Butler. If we stick to your time limit, perhaps we will see your talents in the Chair in the main Chamber one day. I congratulate the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) for securing this crucial debate. I would also like to declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for writers and as the author of three books. For all the benefits that AI brings, its growth also comes with serious risks. Take two examples. AI was used in the production of the recent Beatles song, “Now and Then”; the technology isolated and clarified John Lennon’s voice from a decades-old cassette demo to revive a lost Beatles song. Yet a similar AI model was used to artificially generate former President Joe Biden’s voice and urge voters not to cast a ballot in the New Hampshire primary election. Last Tuesday, as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for writers, I hosted a reception with a brilliant group of literary creatives, during which I was struck by a speech from the University of Cambridge’s Dr Clementine Collett about the impact of generative AI on novel-writing and publishing. The literary sector is a key component of our economy, contributing £11 billion annually. However, genAI has been allowed to push the UK’s world-renowned literary sector to the brink of irreversible change. At this moment, the work of novelists is being pirated on an unprecedented scale to train genAI to write novels. That work is taken without permission or remuneration—a gross infringement on the rights of the creative community. That practice is not just discouraging, but unsustainable, since the average writer in the UK earns only £7,000 a year. Over half of novelists share a widespread anxiety that AI will entirely displace their work in the future. Generative models are becoming increasingly sophisticated and have the potential to flood the market with automated works of fiction. Storytelling was once exclusively woven into the fabric of our culture. Now it is programmed into algorithms that churn out hollow pieces of fiction stripped of any humanity. Its training data has also led to damaging stereotypes being output by genAI systems. The rise of automated novels will serve to amplify those biases, offering discriminatory tropes a broader platform on which to thrive. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 saw historic ping-pong over Baroness Kidron’s call for greater transparency. I was pleased that the creative industries sector plan published over the summer emphasised the need for extra support, including, notably, a freelance champion, in the wake of AI. Yet we are still a long way from ensuring that the literary sector is protected from the significant harm and potential demise that could be wrought by genAI. There is a plethora of cutting-edge writing initiatives that would benefit from increased funding of the arts councils. In light of AI harms, I strongly encourage the Government to direct funds to vulnerable minority and under-represented groups to counter the uniform voices that generative systems output. Those programmes are vital for nurturing the emerging talent that underpins the UK’s literary excellence. In conclusion, the literary industry is experiencing unprecedented uncertainty. We must act now to ensure that the imaginative, emotional and intellectual complexity of great works of literature is not lost and that novelists can continue to thrive.