Basic principles need to be enshrined to protect the sacred craft of storytelling from this automated onslaught

• Jonny Geller is a literary agent and CEO of The Curtis Brown Group

The single biggest threat to the livelihood of authors and, by extension, to our culture, is not short attention spans. It is AI.

The UK publishing industry – worth more than £11bn, part of the £126bn that our creative industries generate for the British economy – has sat by while big tech has “swept” copyrighted material from the internet in order to train their models. Recently, the AI startup Anthropic settled a $1.5bn copyright case over this issue, but the ship has undeniably left the harbour and big tech is sailing off with the goods.

Jonny Geller is CEO of The Curtis Brown Group