Category Archives: Arts

Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Intellectual Property, Publishing, Technology

Authors should be protected over big tech

COPYRIGHT LAWS AND AI

Intro: Creative artists and writers are voicing their anger at AI theft of their work with ‘Human Authored’ logos and an empty book. The government must listen

DURING last week’s London Book Fair, The Society of Authors stamped its books with “Human Authored” logos, in scenes that might have come from a dystopian novel. They described its labelling scheme as “an important sticking plaster to protect and promote human creativity in lieu of AI labelled content in the marketplace”.

Entrants to the fair were also given copies of Don’t Steal This Book, an anthology of some 10,000 writers including Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, Malorie Blackman, Jeanette Winterson, and Richard Osman. The pages of the book are completely blank, but the back cover states: “The UK government must not legalise book theft to benefit AI companies.” The message is clear and simple: writers have had enough.

The book fair arrived before the government is due to deliver its progress report on AI and copyright, after proposals for a relaxation of existing laws caused outrage last year. Philippa Gregory, the novelist, described the plans for an “opt-out” policy, which puts the onus on writers to refuse permission for their work to be trawled, as akin to putting a sign on your front door asking burglars to pass by.

According to a University of Cambridge study last autumn, almost 60% of published authors believe their work has been used to train large language models without consent or reimbursement. And nearly 40% said their income had already fallen as a result of generative AI or machine-made novels, a digital incarnation of Orwell’s Versificator in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Factual books are clearly most susceptible to ChatGPT and other AI generative tools. While sales in fiction are rising, sales of nonfiction were down 6% last year compared with 2024. But three nonfiction books, all by female authors, bucked the trend: Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir of abuse; A Hymn to Life, Gisèle Pel icot’s testimony and account of her ordeal at the hands of her ex-husband; and Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s exposé of working at Facebook. The success of these first-person narrations show the powerful reach of nonfiction beyond the world of publishing. These are painfully human stories; readers must be able to trust in the authenticity of their voices.

Last year, novelist Sarah Hall requested that her publisher Faber, print a “Human Written” stamp on her latest book, Helm. “AI might mimic the words more rapidly, but . . . it hasn’t bled on the page,” she said. “And it doesn’t have a family to support.”

Writers’ livelihoods must not be sacrificed to the promise of economic growth. The UK’s creative industries contributed £124bn to the UK economy in 2023, of which £11bn came from publishing. The Society of Authors is requesting consent and fair payment for use of work, and transparency as to how a book was “written”. These are hardly radical propositions. But in an era of fake news and AI slop, they are sadly necessary. Writers and creative artists need more than sticking plasters. They need robust legislation.

A House of Lords report recently published lays out two possible futures: one in which the UK “becomes a world-leading home for responsible, legalised artificial intelligence (AI) development” and another in which it continues “to drift towards tacit acceptance of large-scale, unlicensed use of creative content”. One scenario protects UK artists, the other benefits global tech companies. To avoid a world of empty content, the choice is clear.

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Arts, Broadcasting, Culture, Opera, Theatre

Fires of the Moon

MUSICAL-THEATRE

– Fires of the Moon is powerfully imagined and atmospherically shot Credit: Channel 4

This powerfully imagined and atmospheric new piece of music-theatre, with an outstanding cast of Welsh singers, is a rare creation that blends film, opera, and drama. A screening such as this rarely makes it to television.

Originally an opera commissioned by OPRA Cymru, first shown as a film at the Edinburgh Film Festival last summer, Fires of the Moon (Channel 4/S4C) is not an example of an opera setting a book, but rather a free imagining of some scenes from Un Nos Ola Leuad (1961) by Caradog Prichard – a modern classic that has become familiar in translation as One Moonlit Night. It was a novel initially criticised for its unrelenting view of Welsh life but became accepted as a realistic reflection of a changing world.

Haunting and elegiac, the visual style conjures up the bleak landscapes of Wales – slate quarries, gloomy pubs, shining lakes and distant hills, with the evocative steam engine of Blaenau Ffestiniog puffing through. In the 1950s, a son Hogyn returns by train to visit his mother who, a generation ago, was confined to an asylum. But why? The story unravels from a youthful romance between Hogyn and Jini, replayed in a cinema that he watches with Jini as the usherette, and the tale pulls no punches in its depiction of an unforgiving society.

Commencing with what sounds like a deliberate homage to the music of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (and even a nod to his unfinished Third Symphony), the beautifully judged score by Gareth Glyn nourishes the narrative. Most will not know how well the Welsh text is reflected musically, except that its subtitled vocal lines sit perfectly within the framework that Glyn creates in his idiom, at once romantic and eclectic, that draws on everything from film music to Britten and Berg.

The orchestral playing by the Welsh National Opera Orchestra is vividly textured and strongly audible under conductor Iwan Teifion Davies (who is also the co-librettist with Patrick Young). The scenario by Marc Evans, though arguably lacking in contrast, allows for a choral number in the pub, a tense tea-time scene, and an intricate quartet in the car on the way to the gloom of the asylum.

Tenor Huw Ynyr is outstanding as the grown Hogyn, as is Dylan Jones as Hogyn the child, writing the story on the old typewriter as well as living it. Annes Elwy is Jini; the tormented figure of Mam is powerfully drawn by soprano Elin Pritchard. The attack by her brother and the scene of her awkward removal to the Denbigh Asylum are the most painful parts of the story.

Chris Forster directs; the black-and-white cinematography under Ben Chads is consistently excellent, and the synchronisation of the voices – always the trickiest aspect of opera with the voices shot separately for film – is pretty good.

This is an absorbing piece of music-theatre which demonstrates the distinctiveness and best of Welsh music and film-making. It also offers a way forward for transforming the medium of staged opera into compelling film.

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Arts, Books, Education, Literature, Poetry

Book Review: Look Closer

NATIONAL YEAR OF READING

Intro: Published in late 2025, ‘Look Closer: How To Get More Out of Reading’ is the latest work by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a Professor of English Literature at Oxford.

Part memoir, part masterclass, the book is a “love letter” to the act of reading. The author argues that in our age of digital distraction and short-form content, the art of “slow reading” is more vital than ever

In the era of the smart phone and other devices, reading has become a dying art. In 2024, 40 per cent of Britons did not read or listen to a book. More than a third of adults are known to have given up reading for pleasure. In this digital age, it’s easy to see why. Small, compact devices have changed how we read: skimming rather than lingering over language, and the need to look for a quick fix of information.

Today, for too many of us, reading books has become a means to an end. We need to look no further than the armada of self-help authors promising to help you do it more quickly and, by implication, to read more overall. “Read more than 300 pages in one hour,” pledges one. “Speed Reading Faster: Maximise Your Success in Business and Study,” urges another.

The advice from literary artists is simple: ditch the idea that reading faster is better. Various movements have emerged in recent years, trying to help us get more out of life by taking it at a less frenetic pace: slow food, slow work, slow travel, even slow sex. “Slow reading” may sound rather different – the sort of thing that might evoke pity or scorn – but it can help break the bad habits into which many of us have fallen.

As the National Year of Reading is now upon us, there are certain things we can do to reverse the drift.

. Look closer at familiar classics

Some literary works have become so familiar that our eyes slide over them without stopping. But if we slow down our reading, even these works retain the power to surprise us – and to make us look at the world around us in a new and refreshing way.

Take the most famous speech in Hamlet:

“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?”

Hamlet’s famous question isn’t carried only by what he says, but by how he says it. That’s because his speech is written in lines of blank verse, 10 syllables long, that repeatedly topple over with an extra 11th syllable – “To be or not to be, that is the quest… ion” – then start again. Over and over, it’s synonymous with someone peering over the edge of a cliff before drawing back. Listening carefully to Hamlet allows us to see life (and death) from his perspective: the rhythm represents the way he’s thinking.

. Linger on little details

Another approach is to look again at a poem that’s often reprinted or published in anthologies – appropriate, since “anthology” literally means “a collection of flowers”:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud

That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host of dancing Daffodils;

Along the Lake, beneath the trees,

Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.

Wordworth’s ambition was to awaken a more imaginative response to homely or neglected corners of the world, and that aim is captured in the smallest details of his verse. The present participle “dancing” shows how something that happened in the past is still happening in his memory. His line breaks work like double-takes, as he searches for exactly the right word for what he saw: “a crowd / A host”.

Finally, his choice of “host” reveals how he detects a divine presence hovering in the background (angels as the heavenly host), while also suggesting that the sight of all these laughing daffodils has somehow made him feel more at home in the world. It’s another piece of writing that doesn’t give us a set of finished thoughts, but instead introduces us to a different way of thinking.

. Embrace the suggestive and opaque

Some literary works are so brief they function as highly effective training aids for this much more measured approach. For example, there’s a famous short story, often erroneously attributed to Ernest Hemingway, that reads: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” That’s it – a tragedy in just six words. Written more than 30 years ago, it is still being thought about today.

Like all the best pieces of writing, it works like an imaginary dumdum bullet: it enters our minds and keeps on expanding. (If you want to discover who the original author was, you’re likely to be disappointed. Versions of this story date back to the early 1900s, and a classified ad reading “For sale: baby carriage, never used” can be found in an American newspaper published in 1883.)

. Ask yourself – or Sherlock – what a good reader is

Some books even contain helpful clues about how to read them. A character such as Sherlock Holmes is a model reader, for instance, because he notices every detail and shows how they combine into a meaningful whole. He sifts life for significance. Take The Boscombe Valley Mystery: Holmes assembles a whole series of tiny clues, including a bit of cigar ash that he establishes is from an Indian cigar, and a boot print that he deduces was made by someone with a limp.

At one point he says to Watson, “you see…”, and although it’s only a passing remark, it also works like a miniature version of the whole story. A literary detective makes us “see”, in the sense of showing us how to use our eyes more carefully, and then makes us “see” in the sense of understanding more about what we’ve just been reading (“Oh, I see!”).

In his 1881 book Daybreak (Morgenröthe), Friedrich Nietzsche explained that he was “a teacher of slow reading”. In an age of work, he wrote, “that is, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-scurry, which is so eager to ‘get things done’”, what was needed was an approach that would teach people “how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar”.

Nearly half a century and a half later, slow reading is something we need more than ever. We need to break the habit of reading just for information, on the page as well as online; we must get out of that horrid, uneven rhythm of scanning and skipping.

For when we pick up a book, we aren’t only trying to lose ourselves in it. If we’re willing to look closely enough, and to leave our mental doors ajar, we might find ourselves there.

– Look Closer by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is published by Fern Press, 352pp

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