Generative AI could hollow out the photo industry within five years, pro organization warns as creators band together against “the greatest acts of theft in modern history”

Five organizations are lobbying in London this week, urging government action against what the group calls “the greatest acts of theft in modern history:” Generative AI.

This week, the UK’s Association of Photographers (AOP), alongside the Society of Musicians, the Society of Authors, Equity, and the Association of Illustrators, have joined together in a report urging legislative action to protect creative industries in the era of AI. The report, called Brave New World? Justice for Creators in the Age of Generative AI, comes as the organizations lobby in London to protect the UK’s creative industries.

The report combines data from across several creative industries, including the AOP’s recent survey on copyright and AI, with surveys representing 10,000 creatives from organizations that support upwards of 80,000 people.

According to the AOP, around 58 percent of photographers have lost work to generative AI. The reported financial losses are a 142 percent increase from losses reported in the January 2025 survey, amounting to an average of £35,000 (around $48k) in annual losses.

Comparing the AOP survey data to the organization’s surveys from previous years highlights how rapidly GenAI has affected the photography industry. In September 2024, 30 percent of photographers reported losing assignments to GenAI. By February 2025, that number had risen to 58 percent.

The AOP survey data also suggests that many photographers are reducing the number of photographs shared online, with the number of shared images dropping by 46 percent compared to last year. The Brave New World report suggests that more creators are keeping work offline to avoid being picked up and used to train generative AI.

The issue isn’t just a creative one but an economic one, the report suggests. In Brave New World, the AOP warns that without regulation, GenAI could “hollow out the UK’s £2.4 billion photography industry within five years.”

Across all the creative industries represented in the report – which includes photographers as well as musicians, illustrators, and writers – the report highlights a disparity between UK jobs in creative industries and those in the AI tech sector.

The report estimates that the creative sector is worth about £124.6 billion annually and more than 2.4 million jobs, which is almost 30x larger than the UK’s AI sector, with 86,000 jobs and £11.8 billion in 2024.

Creatives are also concerned that GenAI will reduce the number of entry-level and mid-level positions for new artists who are just embarking on a creative career.

In the AOP survey, 94 percent of photographers said they want to see a “Personality Right” introduced. A Personality Right refers to an artist’s ability to protect their name, likeness, and “distinctive creative identity.” In one of the report’s case studies, Tim Flach, President of the Association of Photographers, found that using the prompt “Tim Flach Tiger Image” generated an image similar to his.

The organizations are calling for a new framework for AI legislation modeled after the acronym CLEAR that, at a minimum, requires:

• Consent first: Creators across industries are calling for consent for training, including the ability to choose which works are used in AI training and which are not.
• Licensing, not scraping: The report calls for licensing to be developed in collaboration with relevant trade unions, rather than a one-size-fits-all model across all creative industries.
• Ethical use of training data: The report calls for creative works to be recognized as such and not treated as “free raw materials.”
• Accountability and transparency: The organizations call for standards that require GenAI to disclose what data was used for training, offer tools for creators to check to see if and how their work has been used, and to publish information about training data sources and licensing status, among other standards.
• Remuneration and rights: The standards call for payment for works used in AI training.

The report stresses that “creators are not anti-AI. They want to participate in its economy, not be erased by it.” Licensing data sets for AI is an industry valued at $2-3 billion a year and expected to grow, the study suggests.

The CLEAR framework is both a call for government action as well as a guideline for creative industries and organizations to follow in operations and contracts.

“This is an existential moment for creators,” Baroness Beeban Kidron writes in the report’s foreword. “Copyright is not a technical inconvenience; it is the mechanism that allows creators to earn a living and to retain control over the meaning and integrity of their work. Remove it, and you do not merely damage an industry — you dismantle the conditions under which culture itself can exist.”

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