Imagine waking up to find that the world’s creative works – every painting, poem, song, book, article, video, legal document, photograph, script, scientific paper, speech, all software code, all social media posts – has been taken and used to make someone else rich without creators’ consent.
This is no hypothetical crime thriller, but the hard-hitting reality of what’s happening right now in the digital world. Powerful tech companies, from social media giants to artificial intelligence startups, are quietly siphoning off the value from content creators across all industries. Your ideas, your creativity, your content – they’re being harvested, repackaged, and monetised in a way that gives creators little to no compensation. This is the greatest heist on Earth – a massive, unseen transfer of wealth and intellectual property that threatens to erase the very foundation of creativity, trust, and fairness.
The scope of the heist
This is not just about news publishers being robbed. Content creators across all industries are being exploited. Journalists, musicians, poets, artists, authors, filmmakers, comedians, and short-form video creators – no one is immune. When tech companies scrape content from the web, they’re taking from creators who have put in years of work to perfect their craft. Whether it’s a musician’s melody, a filmmaker’s script, or a comedian’s punchline, big tech companies make their AI models smarter by stealing what we’ve made. They don’t have consent, nor do they compensate the content owner, and they’re not held accountable.
This isn’t just about tech companies collecting ‘public content’, this is not about ‘fair use’, or a ‘data scraping’ issue. This is theft of intellectual property on a massive scale.
And there is added hypocrisy: these companies profit from our work, refuse to give us fair compensation and yet they claim it is unlawful when an AI competitor copies their models.
End of the big tech value exchange with publishers
Having your content used without consent by tech companies is nothing new to content creators. Google and Facebook built their businesses on content produced by others. The tech companies monopolised distribution, but there was an implied value exchange. They sent website traffic back to content creators, allowing them to monetise through ads, subscriptions, or sales. Generative AI has destroyed this exchange of value. It ingests content without permission or payment or adherence to copyright laws or IP consideration and spits out outputs that directly compete with the original creators. The creators now receive nothing in return.
The BBC tested market-leading consumer AI tools – ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini – by giving them access to the BBC News website, and asked them to answer one hundred basic questions about the news, prompting them to use BBC News articles as sources. The results? The team found ‘significant issues’ with 51% of the answers generated by the assistants.
Lack of transparency and copyright enforcement
These big tech companies are threatening the very existence of independent journalism, leaving society susceptible to misinformation. The lack of transparency and effective legal mechanisms for addressing copyright infringement exacerbate the issue.
Governments must resist pressure to legalise intellectual property theft. The UK’s stance on copyright laws will have far-reaching consequences for the future of creative industries globally. An opt-out model for content usage is ineffective, it places an unfair burden on content owners while allowing AI companies to reap all the benefits.
The imbalance of knowledge regarding the content of AI models and what contributes to them creates significant issues when content creators attempt to negotiate contracts for the few licences available. This lack of insight results in content creators losing out on valuable information about the value and popularity of their work that they currently obtain through traffic to their own sites.
Content creators are apprehensive that products like Google’s Gemini Overviews will distance them from their audiences. They fear their content will be repurposed into products that will compete against them, ultimately destroying their livelihood. Some estimates suggest that Overviews, when fully rolled out, will reduce referral traffic to publishers by as much as 85%.
Content, the most valuable big tech resource, is being stolen
While these big tech companies pay billions for hardware and electricity, they expect content — the most valuable resource — to be free. If they must pay for infrastructure, electricity, and server capacity, then our creative work should not be handed over without fair compensation. Governments don’t give out free electricity, so why should our content – the fuel of AI – be any different? It’s time we start treating content as the valuable commodity it is and demand compensation for its use. The most valuable asset to the LLMs are the people who source and gather the information.
While some publishers have agreed to licensing deals with OpenAI and Perplexity, the compensation seems to be minimal. These deals won’t save publishers, and they set a precedent for undervaluing content.
There is no turning back from AI era
The generative AI market is projected to grow by 600% in 2024, reaching $130 billion by 2030. But where is the money for the creators? Nowhere. Tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are spending billions on AI development, but they refuse to compensate the people whose work fuels their models.
We are now in the era of AI. There’s no going back. The largest AI companies are investing $50 to $100 billion annually in engineers, technology, servers, and chips to fuel their advancements. Big tech is expected to spend over $320 billion in 2025 alone on AI development and infrastructure. Amazon plans to invest over $100 billion in, Microsoft anticipates spending approximately $80 bilion Alphabet (Google), expects to allocate around $75 billion and, Meta (Facebook) projects capital expenditures between $60 billion and $65 billion
Additionally, OpenAI, in collaboration with SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, has launched the Stargate Project—a joint venture planning to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the United States by 2029, with an initial investment of $100 billion.
But whilst the big AI players—OpenAI, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft—are spending big, they are also realising they have no great defence of their position. It’s only a matter of time before smaller, more agile companies build on their infrastructure and eat their margins. To defend their investments, they are fighting hard to control content access, attempting to justify their theft as a necessity. Their entire business model relies on securing free content, but their dominance is no longer guaranteed.
How publishers can fight back against the great steal
Here’s the reality – creators have to fight back. Right now, it’s far too easy for these companies to scrape our work, take it for their own use, and sell it for massive profits. We need to start making it harder for them to do this. We can’t let them continue taking our work without asking, paying, or giving us credit.
It’s time to introduce friction. Whether it’s better digital watermarking, more legal protections, or improved content tracking, creators need to create barriers that make it harder for these companies to exploit our work. We need systems that ensure our content is protected and we’re compensated for its use.
Creators need to:
Unite across industries: This isn’t just about musicians or writers; it’s about every creator. The more we join forces, the stronger we become.
Protect our work: We need stronger protections for our work and systems that make it harder for AI companies to scrape our content without our consent.
Licensing and fair compensation: We need to negotiate licensing agreements that put us in the driver’s seat.
Create unique content: We need to double down on what makes us unique. AI can replicate style, but it can never replicate the human touch, the voice, or the creativity that we bring to our work. Let’s focus on content that AI can’t simply replicate.
Advocate: The theft of this content needs to be brought to the attention of the general public.
Once AI models are trained on stolen content, the damage is irreversible. The longer this goes unchecked, the harder it will be to claw back rights. AI companies are racing forward, but if we don’t act now, creators will be permanently locked out of the digital economy they helped build.
This is the greatest heist on Earth. We need to stop it before it’s too late.
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