Ophelia After Millais, 2018, from the series Old Father Thames, 2018–2025 © Julia Fullerton-Batten. The award-winning photographer and AOP member, who painstakingly creates her tableau images, is part of a cohort of artists currently discussing setting up a class action against AI firms who have used their images in training datasets.
The UK government is consulting on changes to copyright legislation that will help AI companies at the expense of photographers and other creatives. Isabelle Doran – CEO of the Association of Photographers (AOP), vice chair of the Creators’ Rights Alliance, and board member of the British Copyright Council – reports for BJP
For more than a decade, big tech has been lobbying the UK government to change its copyright law. Why? To make it easier to exploit artistic works, currently protected by copyright, for a myriad of commercial products. UK copyright law does not obstruct innovation, it incentivises creators to produce work, get paid, and reinvest in their work – it is the foundation of the creative ecosystem.
Until recently, technology supported photographers and image-makers. The collaboration between creator and technology led to the transition from analogue to digital, improving the delivery of human-authored creative works. However, with the emergence of Generative AI (GAI) programs over the last few years (which can output synthetic images using a simple command or prompt) arises an existential threat that challenges photographers’ ability to control the use of their digital photographs online. Now they find they are competing with machines that can output synthetic works with little or no effort, all without permission or payment for a photographer’s own intellectual creation.
It is estimated GAI has already output as many synthetic images in one and a half years as it has taken image-makers to create in over 150 years – approximately 15 billion outputs. When the Association of Photographers (AOP) surveyed its members in September 2024, 30 per cent reported losing commissioned work to GAI; that had increased in five months by 21 per cent when the survey was conducted again in February 2025, totalling an average value loss of £14,400 per professional photographer, and total membership value transfer (loss) of approximately £43.2million.
Photographers are not the only creators affected – 36 per cent of translators report losing work due to Generative AI, while 32 per cent of illustrators have lost work to AI with an average financial loss of £9,262 each. Furthermore, 65 per cent of fiction writers and 57 per cent of non-fiction writers believe AI will negatively impact future earnings, while 71 per cent are concerned about AI mimicking their style without consent.


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“The issue for imagemakers and photographers is that without government support to enforce copyright, there is little that can be done to stop web crawlers from scraping images across the internet”
In December 2024, the UK government set out a new consultation on copyright and AI, which closed on 25 February 2025, coinciding with an AI Opportunities Action Plan proposing to unleash AI adoption across the UK and remove any perceived barriers. The key driver for the consultation was certain AI developers in big tech, mostly US based, striving to gain unfettered access to copyright-protected works, such as digital photographs. With over 11,000 responses to the consultation – the second largest human-authored response to a government consultation, and all being reviewed by hand rather than using AI, which should have been verified to start with – it is going to take several months before the government announces its next steps.
The new consultation comes after the previous UK government reviewed copyright legislation in 2022, looking specifically at broadening a copyright exception on text and data-mining (TDM) for research purposes to all purposes including commercial use. Plans to change UK copyright law were successfully quashed by the combined efforts of creative industry representatives, including the Association of Photographers, and parliamentarians who recognised the possible impact on creators’ livelihoods.
The issue now faced is that US tech giants have arguably even more political influence and promised economic growth from AI, at the expense of the UK creative and media industries. Hence spreading a false narrative that UK copyright law is ‘uncertain’; however, it is clear that scraping creative works, such as photographs, from the internet without permission or payment is an illegal act under UK law.
The consultation proposed four options for respondents to select – do nothing; strengthen copyright by requiring licensing; a broad data-mining exception to copyright for all purposes, including commercial use; a broad data-mining exception to copyright for all purposes, including commercial use with transparency and rights reservation (opting out). Strengthened copyright by requiring licensing is the closest to our standard business practice, but this has to come with transparency over how or when creative works are used for Generative AI purposes – the two should go hand-in-hand. Formal rights reservation (opting out) proposals are what significantly concerns the AOP, along with so many other creative organisations, and what we are demanding be clarified.

Creative artistic works are seen by big tech as merely data freely available online to take (scrape) and commercially exploit, for AI training and refining purposes, in order to develop programs that compete with creators’ livelihoods. The issue for imagemakers and photographers is that without government support to enforce copyright, there is little that can be done to stop web crawlers from scraping images across the internet, whether that is websites, social media platforms or other networks, in order to collate massive datasets which are then used for training Generative AI programs.
The vastness of these datasets is invisible to most creators. For example, Hugging Face, which hosts the LAION-5B dataset (consisting of five billion images scraped from the internet used to train Stable Diffusion and Midjourney), has over 300,000 datasets of images, text, audio and video, which are subsequently used to train over 1.5 million AI models it also hosts. We have no oversight over whose creative works feature in these datasets, how creators can prevent the appearance of or remove copyright-protected works from these datasets subsequently used without permission, and how creators can be compensated for the exploitation of their works to date.
GAI is statistical pattern-predicting technology that outputs machine derivatives of the works a program is trained on. It is different to other AI applications that can improve efficiency, or assist with automating complex tasks which may have been around for years. For example, various software editing tools, camera operations and image processing software have AI features, which enhance image-makers’ creative practice. But GAI is machine technology that replicates or mimics human originality at a fraction of the time and cost, and gives the illusion of control while being little more than a production line manufacturing cheap synthetic imitations. This undermines the originality and value of human creative endeavour, undoubtedly taking away the heart and soul of what it means to be a photographer.
The proposed formal ‘rights reservation’ or ‘opt-out’ is unworkable, firstly because all creators’ rights in their works are reserved the moment they are created – copyright is an automatic right in the UK and Europe. Secondly it places a significant burden on creators to reinforce their rights – a process creators should not have to undertake. The process of scraping (web crawlers or bots using robot.txt access) can be compared to leaving the front door to your house open so that an estate agent can come in and record it – but at the same time allowing burglars in to steal your furniture to sell on. If you do not want that to happen you have to leave a note on your front door, or on your furniture, to prevent it from happening. If you close your ‘front door’, it effectively means your discoverability online vanishes, which for professional photographers means becoming invisible to commissioners searching online.

Creators should not have the additional burden of having to source and utilise technical protection measures to prevent the use of their work for AI development. They also cannot always do so effectively as they do not have control over downstream uses of their works on other websites, networks or social media platforms, nor deal with the vast number of digital photographs they have in their archives.
The AOP hopes that the government revises its preferred option of applying a broad exception and imposing a formal rights reservation process. Ministers, from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and the Intellectual Property Office, have reassured that they will not place the creative industries in jeopardy. However, with many parliamentarians unaware of the significance of copyright to image-makers and other creators as a means to determine the use of their creative work and derive an income from licensing, it remains uncertain what the decision will be – whether the government will look to introduce legislation for a broader data-mining exception for commercial use. If any new legislation is introduced, it may be in the next parliamentary session, in autumn 2025.
The AOP has been heavily involved in trying to ensure the government, policy officials and members of parliament are aware of the impact of changing our ‘gold standard’ UK copyright law on photographers and image-makers, from both an economic and resource perspective. It has attended numerous meetings with ministers, government officials, MPs and House of Lords representatives, as well as industry roundtable sessions with Oxford University, responsible AI and technology advocates. The AOP took the early initiative to join the Creative Rights in AI Coalition (CRAIC) which now includes over 69 creative and media organisations. The AOP set about hosting a town hall session for members in January, drafting template constituency letters to MPs for them, providing guidance on responding to the consultation, and submitting its own 29-page consultation response.
However, the policy work continues. With so many new MPs in parliament, the AOP needs to keep stressing how important copyright is as a foundation for economic growth for photographers and image-makers. It also needs to explain how the creative industries ecosystem functions – this sector has a significantly larger proportion of freelancers than other UK industry sectors. A professional photographer will typically work with a range of industry people to deliver commissioned work, therefore if a photographer is impacted by losing work to GAI, so too are their industry colleagues.

Furthermore, the AOP needs to show the economic harm and value transfer if copyright law is changed for the benefit of big tech and unfettered AI development. With almost £125billion GVA (Gross Value Added) to the UK economy and the employment of 2.4 million people in the creative sector, we cannot afford to hand over our cultural creativity to big tech overseas. As we have done with 300 years of copyright protection after the printing press was invented, we need to nurture and support our human creative talent.
As members of CRAIC, the AOP is using the campaign as a focal point, directing photographers to email their MPs asking them to safeguard creators’ rights and support the campaign. The CRAIC website has an interactive webpage which simplifies the process of contacting MPs – just type in your postcode, customise a template email and press send. It could not be easier to safeguard creativity’s future, and we urge photographers to do so.