UK collecting societies urge 'Smart Fund' levy to pay creators

Visual artists’ median annual earnings are £12,500, down 47% in real terms since 2010.

The chief executives of four UK collecting societies have urged the government to introduce a “Smart Fund” levy on devices used to copy or store creative work, arguing that AI companies should pay the creators whose work they use before pledging money for public causes. Barbara Hayes of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), Tayyiba Nasser of the British Equity Collecting Society (BECS), Christian Zimmermann of the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) and Paul Seheult of PICSEL made the case in a letter published in The Guardian on 25 October.

The letter says the fund could raise up to £300m a year, providing creators with additional income and supporting skills, cultural programmes and affordable workspaces. It responds to Anthropic’s 19 October proposal to commit 5% of its shares to a fund for the “public good,” asking “who should benefit from technological progress?”

Before pledging money for the public good, AI companies such as Anthropic should first pay the creators whose work they use, the executives wrote. “It is creators’ work that attracts people to technology, sustains their engagement and drives innovation,” they added. “Those creators should share in the value their work helps generate, so they can continue creating and powering that cycle.”

The letter assigns device manufacturers a separate responsibility under the same principle, arguing that creators should share in the value their work generates. Smartphones, computers and other devices enable creative work to be copied and stored, the letter notes, yet UK creators receive no private-copying payments, unlike their counterparts in more than 40 other countries.

The proposed Smart Fund would require manufacturers and importers to make “modest contributions” on devices used to copy or store creative work, according to the letter.

The executives said such payments “would make a tangible difference” for creators on persistently low and falling incomes. The letter states that visual artists’ median annual earnings are £12,500 — 47% lower in real terms than in 2010. Authors earn a median of only £7,000 from writing, down from £11,300, according to surveys published in 2022 and 2018 respectively, and audiovisual performers report median annual earnings from performing of £17,500.

The letter closes by pressing the government to act: “The government should turn this principle into action by introducing the Smart Fund.”

The Guardian published the letter alongside an Olga Fedorova/EPA photograph of an anti-AI protest in New York last week.