IIt’s an unlikely alliance: billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and a number of leading artists, including Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, actors Kevin Bacon and Julianne Moore, and author Kazuo Ishiguro.

This week they began two very public battles with artificial intelligence companies, accusing them of using their intellectual property without permission to develop the increasingly powerful and lucrative new technology.

More than 13,000 creative professionals from the fields of literature, music, film, theater and television released a statement warning that AI companies training programs like ChatGPT on their works without a license pose a “major, unwarranted threat” to theirs represented livelihood. By the end of the week, that number had almost doubled to 25,000.

This came a day after Murdoch, owner of publishing group News Corp, whose newspapers include the Wall Street Journal, Sun, Times and Australian, launched a legal action against AI-powered search engine Perplexity, accusing it of “illegal conduct”. had “copying” the journalism of some of its US titles.

The stars’ statement is a concerted attempt to challenge the idea that creative works are used as training data without compensation for reasons of “fair use” – a US legal term that means no permission is required from the copyright holder can. What adds to their anger is the fact that these AI models can then be used to produce new works that rival those made by humans.

AI was a key sticking point in last year’s double strikes by Hollywood actors and writers, securing deals to ensure the new technology remained under workers’ control and not used as a replacement for them. Whether the copyright dispute will be similarly successful will likely be determined by several ongoing legal disputes.

In the US, artists are also suing tech companies behind image generators, major record labels are suing AI music creators Suno and Udio, and a group of writers including John Grisham and George RR Martin are suing ChatGPT developer OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement.

In the battle to get AI companies to pay for the content they use to develop their tools, publishers are also pursuing legal avenues to get them to the negotiating table to sign licensing deals.

Publishers such as Politico owner Axel Springer, Vogue publisher Condé Nast, the Financial Times and Reuters have entered into content deals with various AI companies, and in May News Corp signed a five-year deal with OpenAI that was reportedly worth $250 million US dollars has. In contrast, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against the ChatGPT maker and sent a “cease and desist” letter to Perplexity last week.

However, in the UK, AI companies are pushing for a change in the law so they can continue to develop their tools without the risk of infringing intellectual property rights. Currently, the text and data mining required to train generative AI tools is only permitted for non-commercial research purposes.

This week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called for a rethink of what “fair use” is. He argued that the large language models that underlie generative AI do not “represent” the information they were trained on, which would be considered copyright infringement.

New Labor Minister for AI and Digital Government, Feryal Clark, recently said she wants to resolve the copyright dispute between the creative industries and AI companies by the end of the year.

She said this could take the form of an amendment to existing laws or new legislation that opens the possibility of adding a new clause allowing AI companies to scrape data for commercial purposes.

“Tech companies have used a lot of British content for free to train large language models and are now lobbying to weaken British law to cover their tracks,” said Dan Conway, the chief executive of the Publishers Association.

“One cost to your business is paying for the content you use. Labor has a unique opportunity to set the policy terms for responsible AI in the UK. Licensing agreements should be signed between the creative industries and AI companies to support the UK ecosystem.”

While news groups publicly oppose using their content for AI, behind the scenes many are turning to the technology to replace editorial functions, fueling fears among staff that commercially struggling publishers will use them as a Trojan horse to cut costs and to enable job cuts.

Last month, the National Union of Journalists launched a campaign called “Journalism before Algorithms” to highlight the issue.

“The use of AI must be considered in the context of wage stagnation, below-inflation wage increases, understaffed newsrooms and increasing layoffs,” it said. “Threats to journalists’ jobs are at the forefront… AI is not a replacement for real journalism.”

“The question is how often publishers use these tools themselves,” said Niamh Burns, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “I think the scale of deployment is small, there’s a lot of experimentation going on, but I could imagine a world where publishers will make heavy use of some of these tools. However, publishers need to be realistic about the extent of efficiency improvements and revenue generation opportunities.”

Burns said that so far publishers’ willingness to use AI tools that directly impact or create editorial content depends on how commercial the pressures on the media environment are for that operator.

The once-mighty BuzzFeed, whose market value has fallen to less than $100 million from $1 billion when it went public in 2021, has quickly become an AI adopter amid deep newsroom cuts and falling revenue .

And Newsquest, the second largest newspaper publisher in the competitive UK regional and local press market, has launched initiatives including a rapid increase in the number of “AI-powered” journalism roles.

High-quality national newspaper and media brands remain extremely cautious and many of them – including the Guardian – are setting strict principles to guide their work.

However, behind the scenes, AI tools are used to, for example, categorize large data sets to then enable journalists to report on new and exclusive content.

“I think the media companies that are most at risk economically in the short term are also at risk of overdoing it,” Burns said.

“A lot of it has to do with commercial models. If you rely on high-traffic advertising on social platforms and just need size, not necessarily quality, then AI could really help.

“However, creating AI generative content will not be worth the cost or risk (for high-quality national titles). And for any publisher, there will be a longer-term cost to quality and a risk to competitiveness if they produce more journalism that works to standards.”