Thangam Debbonaire delivered the keynote speech at the 2026 Publishers’ Licensing Services conference…
…in which she urged attendees to move quickly on AI licensing and transparency
else, that’s not really a legal business model in this country.” The problem is not only that writers may go unpaid, but that the system AI depends on will begin to hollow itself out. “Large language models can generate a work of fiction,” she argues, “and they can maybe even generate quite a good work of fiction, because they’re training on works of fiction by authors.” But if works by human writers are removed from that equation, AI “can’t write any new work” and will be “AI training on AI”. In Debbonaire’s telling, the danger is not only exploitation but depletion, with an AI economy feeding on human creativity, while eroding the conditions that allow new human work to exist. “Do we want human creativity? Yes, because human creativity can move us,” she says. “It can soothe us. It can provoke us.” The question then becomes not only whether the work is lawful, or remunerated, but what counts as creativity in the first place, and the value we place on creative work. AI companies may argue that AI can move, soothe and provoke too. “Then you have to ask the bigger philosophical question,” she says. “Are there things that we think matter so much to our humanity that we’re not prepared to let AI just run them? AI might be useful in them, AI might help, but humans have to be involved.”
T
he debate around the use of AI in publishing has become polarised, and Debbonaire is wary of the creative industries falling into pure alarm over a technology that
is already being embedded into the fabric of creative labour. “The people who say they hate AI and don’t use it – they almost certainly are,” she says. “I’m not accusing them of being hypo- crites, I’m just saying it’s already here. So, we’ve got to find a way of engaging.” She recognises that there is deep scepticism
about AI, and while she understands the fear, she does not condone the fearmongering, describing it as “really unhelpful”. She instead calls for a more productive conversation around the use of AI. “I think a better way to look at it would be: ‘There are things to be fearful about, so let’s deal with them. Let’s have a look at them. Let’s work out how we can make them not fearful, how we can make them fair, how we can make them part of enhancing our humanity.’” On fearmongering, Debbonaire adds that it
is a “strategy that doesn’t really work, because you’re fearmongering about something that’s here, it’s already happening”. It also makes the industry less able to ask the more useful ques- tions about the role AI can play in the creative process. “Which bits can we take away without taking away human agency and human skill?” She gives the example of using AI to cut down
a speech. “I’m a better writer than it is, but it edited really well,” she says. “Do I become a less good writer for using a machine editor to edit my speech? I’d say not.” The question changes when it comes to young people learning to write, for example, but the line she is trying to draw is between using AI as support and substitution, adding: “I don’t want young people not to know the joy of pen on paper or finger on keyboard.”
actually some of it is really good writing. I think similarly about podcasts.” Technology companies have made having a
nuanced debate harder, she argues, by refusing to engage properly with the creative industries. The attitude that she detected in tech some years ago, “and actually even now”, is that of: “‘We don’t have to listen to you because we’re fine anyway.’ And that, in turn, then does make people fearful.” A licensing system is the practical middle
There are things to be fearful about, so let’s deal with them. Let’s have a look at them. Let’s work out how we can make them not fearful, how we can make them fair
Debbonaire wants to know when a piece of
writing has been authored by a human. “There are certain rhythms, where you think, a machine wrote this – and sometimes that’s fine. But when you are in a system where it’s being passed off as human creativity, that’s a problem.” A historical fiction writer, for exam- ple, might use AI, but would still need to inter- rogate its sources and ask whether it was “hallucinating”. The task is to decide “when it doesn’t matter” whether it was used. She sees the polarisation around AI as part
of a wider collapse in nuance. “If I’m not with you, I must be against you, and if I don’t like what you’re saying, I can’t just listen to what you’re saying. I have to shout at you, or walk away, or not engage. There’s very little room for nuance in a lot of political debate and policy- making. Very little room for nuance in the public square that is social media.” We are, however, moving awkwardly in the
right direction in terms of the discourse. “We’re not at the shoutiness that we were at even six months ago,” she tells me. She notes that podcasts and longform plat- forms like Substack have also created more space for discursive thinking. “I know people have got their criticisms of Substack. Some of it is good, and some of it is not, but
ground between panic and inaction, according to Debbonaire. “Licensing is better than no licens- ing,” she explains. “No licensing system at this stage is going to be perfect. PLS is developing one, which I think is great, it’s a good start.” At the conference, PLS’ collective AI licensing initia- tive formed a central part of the discussion. The scheme, developed with the Copyright Licensing Agency and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, is intended to give publishers an optional route to license content for generative AI, sitting alongside direct licensing deals. Debbonaire’s ideal five years from now is not
a dismantling of copyright law – quite the oppo- site. “Anything that is written tomorrow, copy- right is still assumed. Copyright law doesn’t need to be changed, it can be tweaked, but essentially, you keep copyright law, and you have a system of licensing roughly like what PLS have devel- oped.” The hope is that the industry will have “figured it out” or “got better at it” by then, putting it in a position to negotiate percentages. A licensing system will not satisfy everyone,
but she says “nothing is not an option anymore”. “I mean, it is. That’s the status quo. No licensing. But nobody’s happy about it either.” When I ask what the world looks like in five years if there is still no system, she does not soften the conclusion. “I don’t want to be fearmongering either, but there’s a reality here. We carry on as we are, and eventually we run out of creative work, original creative work, or people are working for free. I mean, everyone can join the dots.” A middle ground, she says, is “both possible and necessary”.
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