Author Philip Pullman calls on government to act over ‘wicked’ AI scraping

Author Sir Philip Pullman has called on the government to change copyright laws on “scraping”, where writers’ books are used to train artificial intelligence (AI) software to understand and generate human language.

Writers whose work has been scraped don’t get compensation or recognition, something authors including Kate Mosse and Richard Osman have criticised, saying it could destroy growth in creative fields and amount to “theft”.

Sir Philip, author of the hugely popular novels about Lyra Silvertongue, the heroine of His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust trilogies, thinks writers should be compensated.

“They can do what they like with my work if they pay me for it,” he told the BBC’s culture editor Katie Razzall. “But stealing people’s work… and then passing it off as something else… That’s immoral but unfortunately not illegal.”

Sir Philip said: “As far as I know everybody’s work has been stolen, scraped like a trawler… at the bottom of the sea. Prawns, oysters, starfishes, mermaids, whatever. You name it, it’s all killed.

“It’s a wicked system and I’m profoundly against it.”

Sir Philip says he wants the government to act now, change the law and fight back.

“Of course they should change it at once,” he said. “Don’t you steal anybody else’s work.”

Sir Philip’s latest novel, The Rose Field, completes the second trilogy about Lyra. The first five books have so far sold 49 million copies globally.

Lyra lives in a universe parallel to our own, where people have a daemon – a companion spirit in animal form.

Early on she uncovers a conspiracy using kidnapped children, and uses a truth-telling device called an alethiometer.

“She’s always curious and inquisitive,” he says. “I think it’s a very important quality. We should praise people who are curious. We should encourage it in children.”

The books see her grow from an 11-year-old girl into a woman in her early 20s, with her world ruled by the Magisterium, a shadowy religious and political organisation.

In The Rose Field, the Magisterium is waging war on imagination, which it calls a false, seductive and dangerous doctrine.

Former English teacher Sir Philip, 78, goes on to describe what he sees as real-life enemies of imagination.

He highlights “the education policy of the government, which insists on learning things off by heart, sitting in rows and walking silently down corridors”, along with learning about the grammar of language “before you can use it”, calling this “nonsense”.

The writer, who is clearly a fan of using the imagination, as evidenced in his writing, calls it “a form of perception”.

He explains that his final book in the trilogy is about the the realm of the “Rose Field, in which things exist that you can only see with your imagination”.

“They’re there but you can’t see them if you don’t imagine them, for example, ghosts, wishes, hopes, memories…

“Things you can’t necessarily weigh, measure or analyse chemically, but which are there nonetheless, such as love, fear, hope. That’s what Lyra has discovered in the course of this book.”

He’s also an outspoken critic of organised religion.

“The arguments I have are with people in power who use religion to make other people do things… religion gives them a sense of extra certainty when they do that because they believe that they’re fulfilling the will of God,” he says.

Despite writing about other worlds, realms and creatures, he insists he is not a fantasy writer, unlike JRR Tolkien, the author of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books.

“I don’t think there’s any comparison at all between me and Tolkien. He was a writer of fantasy, and I’m not writer of fantasy.”

Despite his books containing magical objects, talking animals and mythical griffins, he insists he is “writing about the real world through a little filter”.

He adds that after saying farewell to Lyra and all the other characters in his books, he will “miss them a little bit”.

But for his millions of fans, there is a glimmer of hope.

This might not be the end of Lyra’s story.

“I can’t say that,” he says. “It might happen.”

He is now writing a memoir about his “unusual childhood” and a picture of the world he grew up in.

His final thought is about the daemons in his books, and he muses over what animal form his own might take.

“I think she’d be a corvid,” he says. “I love ravens. They’re not very well loved. I don’t care.

“Their flying is extraordinary, their aerobatics turning upside down and zooming so close to the ground.

“They’re wonderful birds to watch, they’re very clever.

“And In some mythologies, the raven is the storyteller.”

The Rose Field: The Book of Dust Volume Three will be published on 23 October, including the audiobook, which is read by actor Michael Sheen.