As the conversation around the impact of AI on music and creatives grows ever louder, industry leaders have laid out what needs to be done to protect artists and the UK’s creative forces in the future.

This month saw a gathering of industry leaders, artists and experts at Manchester’s Beyond The Music Festival, where an AI summit was held come up with a set of principles based on the idea that “art is a human right” and that creators naturally have a moral and material claim to be both credited and paid for their work.

The ‘Manchester Principles’ were designed as a first-of-its-kind industry-wide plan and rights-based roadmap to align creators, rights-holders, tech platforms, AI labs and policymakers on generative AI regulations.

“When we talk about what the Manchester Principles mean and why you’re here, it’s thinking about how we start that conversation,” Mayor of Greater Manchester Bev Craig told the audience. “How does economic change and technological progress lead into social change? What are the things that we need to demand that can make our world better, safer and protect creativity and our very soul?”

The key ‘Manchester Principles’ objectives agreed upon by the working group were:

• Licensing and consent: “Establishing minimum conditions and clear frameworks for when and how human-created works can be used to train generative AI models.”
• Provenance and tracking: “Protecting and tracking the origin of creative works and data usage.”
• Attribution and equity: “Ensuring proper human credit and economic compensation for artists and creators whose work influences or feeds into AI-generated output.”

During a day that laid out the potential opportunities and threats of AI, the conference heard how we’re “in the first five minutes of the next industrial revolution” and that UK-based-and-owned sovereign models could harness the country’s knowledge, reward our creators and lead the way internationally for AI to be adopted in a fair and moral way.”

Introducing the talks, Ian Murray MP, Minister for Creative Industries, said that this was a sensitive area given that “66 per cent of music creators believe AI poses a direct threat”.

He added that “we cannot ask our creators to choose between embracing innovation and protecting their rights,” while we should simultaneously be working towards the UK becoming “the safest place to develop and adopt AI technology in the world”.

Clive Dickens, who founded Absolute Radio and is now founder and CEO of The Meliora Company, is helping companies and creative outlets to adapt to the ever-enveloping world of AI. Speaking at Beyond The Music, Dickens argued that “the UK must own more than the playlist” when it comes to AI and music.

“We very much believe that human creativity is enhanced by technology,” he argued, sharing that artificial intelligence today is used by just under 2billion people every week in a form “that we know didn’t really exist 50 months ago.”

“Artificial intelligence is a basic human right, in the same way that water, shelter and power are,” he continued. “If you start to think of it that way and all that underpins it, you start to think of the impact that AI will have on 8.2billion people.”

Dickens said that the industry and UK government had to quicken the pace when it came to issues of “regulation, trust and guardrails”, suggesting that they adopt Meliora’s concept or reimagining the term ‘GPT’ (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) as ‘Fair GPT’ – meaning future models would be ‘fair governed, fair powered, and fair trained.

“AI should be fair-governed,” he began. “It should have regulations and laws that help it operate fairly. We should be looking at mandatory reach reporting across our societies. We need a treaty of non-proliferation around bad AI.

“You can’t release medicine into society without regulatory approval, and you shouldn’t be allowed to release AI models without pre-approval as well.”

For the ‘fair powered’ ideal, Dickens said that more should be done to use renewable forms of energy to power data centres. As for ‘fair training’, he called for work to not be scraped or stolen, with provenance, consent and remuneration of sources mandatory. He added that with a sovereign model of its own, the UK could lead the way in future-proof AI use that’s good for humanity and protects creatives.

“People say we’re too late,” he said. “It’s not too late: we are in the first five minutes of the next industrial revolution. We can train our own model.”

Giving said model the hypothetical name ‘Hope V.1’, Dickens argued that it could also be trained on the UK’s vast wealth of non-digitised knowledge, and set for the challenge for it to be created by November 2027 when Manchester hosts the next G20 summit.

He ended by imagining “a model that is fair governed, fair powered and fair trained, where creators get paid off the back of the creative economy, allowing everyone who contributes to that economy to generate income from.”

Dickens added: “We can go one step further and have our own sovereign model, then once we have our own electricity, we can control how that creative culture is exported in our country and across the world.”

Outside of these models, tech is currently being produced to put power back in the hands of artists and creators. As well as working as chief technical officer for Massive Attack across their ambitious live productions and eco-friendly initiatives, Andrew Melchior is also CEO of Genotone. His company are working on technology that will one day prove the human origin and authorship of all recorded music.

Speaking on a panel at Beyond The Music, Melchoir said that the industry urgently needed to provide “clarity, standards and standardised tools that avoid bespoke walled gardens”.

Genotone are working on “inaudible provenance markers” and watermarks inside all audio files, so that all music can either be told apart from AI-slop or that the creators behind the original source can be traced. “My company’s goal is to try and find the Holy Grail of being able to embed artist rights at the point of creation of a piece of music that travels through the system with it,” he said.

“If we have such a standard, which could also become a public infrastructure, then we’ll have a source of truth that people can understand and machine-read at scale to quickly understand what people have opted in for or opted out of to in essence create a birth certificate for the media that you’re creating.”

The same panel saw UK Music CEO Tom Kiehl explain how issues around “mass-scraping, consent, deep-fakes and AI slop were “huge” for the industry, and “deeply personal to artists”.

“This is about how your work can be manipulated, how your work can be changed, how your work can be attributed in a different way,” said Kiehl. “This is an evolving area that we need to get right, but the music industry is an ecosystem too. It’s on all of us who play a part in the sector to make sure that people get that fair reward.”

Expanding on the idea of loss of control, Baroness Beeban Kidron gave an impassioned speech about the nature of artistry. Kidron made headlines last year and gained support from the likes of Elton John, Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa for fighting against Keir Starmer’s government by introducing amendments to the UK’s Data (Use and Access) Bill in the House of Lords – calling for AI companies to transparently disclose the use of copyright-protected works and attempting to stamp out unlicensed scraping.

At Beyond The Music, the former film director said that music and art needed special protection from AI due to the emotion and intention behind the work, and what it means to fans.

“When we read a book, watch a film, listen to a piece of music or look at a painting, someone somewhere, the creator wanted us to understand something, they wanted to say something, someone made a choice, someone wanted us to hear or feel something we otherwise might not have heard or felt,” she told the audience. “It is that art of human creation (the intention, the choice, the meaning) that is stripped of value in this race to control artificial intelligence.”

She continued: “The threat is existential. Lose copyright and you lose the means of earning a living, lose control of your work and you lose control of its meaning.”

Kidron said that the pillars of “ownership and consent, transparency and traceability, fair licence and new markets” needed to be at the centre of any potential future for AI use in music, and that those within the arts needed to agree on the best route or have the future laid out for them by billionaires and tech companies.

“The danger is that if we don’t have an agreement about what we want, then there are people out there who definitely know what they don’t want us to have,” she argued. “This fight is not just about whether artists get paid. It’s actually about the value of human work, where the benefits fall, what kind of society we want to live in and who has the power to decide.”

“The labour of writers, artists, musicians stolen without permission, without payment, the raw material of human creativity, our stories, music, images and ideas harvested, repackaged and sold back to us by those who claim to be inventing the future. These are not faceless data sets, they are the cultural, emotional and intellectual work of millions of people.”

Echoing the call for sovereignty with AI models, Kidron said that this would enable the UK to make and enforce its own laws as well as allowing Britain “to pursue its national interests without coercion or dependence” from huge corporations. “As the power of the technology companies has grown, so too has their determination to shape our laws and negotiate the terms on which they will comply, and enlist the support of their own government to advance their interests,” she argued.

Mentioning the work she’d done with young people as a leading voice on children’s rights in the digital environment, Kidron said that was shocked and saddened to hear one teen boy telling her that “the future is disappearing and he could no longer see himself in it”. Ultimately, the UK needs to get a grip of AI to safeguard the viability of creativity in decades to come.

“Hold the next generation in mind, because already the prospect of human replacement is making children lose sight of their future and there are few things more devastating than stealing a generation’s capacity to imagine a future,” added Kidron. “This is not only about what we can imagine, but also what we are prepared to determine.”

She continued: “The tech sector lobbyists are masters of inevitability, that technology moves too fast to be governed, that the price of innovation is our exploitation. But these are choices, not destinies. The choices that we make now will determine whether the next generation can see a place for themselves in our collective future. The future hasn’t disappeared – it’s being made right now. And as every creator knows, what is made can be made differently.

“Sovereignty has never meant doing everything ourselves, it has always meant retaining the freedom to decide for ourselves: who gets to tell the story of our future?”

Concluding the day’s findings, summit chair and specialist media and entertainment lawyer Cliff Fluet said that the UK music industry and its artists were looking for “creative sovereignty” as “our culture is a shared common wealth and it’s quietly wearing away.”

Fluet ended by saying that we need to put “human creativity first” ensuring that we have “consent, fair pay, transparency, and enforcement that works for everyone” or have our creative industries and artists of the past, present and future pillaged. “Whatever we build has to feed back into the society it’s built from, rather than taking from it.”

A study this summer revealed that AI was detected in 40 per cent of all music released in July alone. Jason Grishkoff, founder of SubmitHub who were behind the study, explained: “I think the path forward for AI music is disclosure. People should be able to decide for themselves whether they want to engage with AI-generated music.”

Another study in 2025 found that 97 per cent of people “can’t tell the difference” between real and AI music. The previous year, it was warned that people working in music were likely to lose a quarter of their income to AI over the next four years.

In March, figures from the UK music industry responded to new government action on copyright, which prevents AI firms from using existing work without permission. However, they argued that much more needed to be done beyond that first step.