Why I nearly decked Nick Clegg at the Chiswick Book Festival

Deborah Annetts having a friendly word with Nick Clegg at the Chiswick Book Festival

The Chief Executive of the Independent Society of Musicians takes issue with the former Meta executive’s answers on AI, copyright and the future of creative work

At this year’s Chiswick Book Festival, Deborah Annetts challenged Nick Clegg in the Q&A about his book How to Save the Internet. Here, she explains why his answers left her so angry.

READ ALSO: Nick Clegg taken to task by the audience at the Chiswick Book Festival

Guest blog by Deborah Annetts

My day job is as CEO of the Independent Society of Musicians, representing 11,000 musicians across the whole of the UK. We do a lot of campaigning, not just for musicians but for all those working in the arts, everything from lobbying for better provision for arts education in schools to Brexit and AI, so this year’s Chiswick Book Festival was a bit like a busman’s holiday. AI just kept cropping up.

At the local authors evening on Wednesday, one of the authors, Pablo Hepworth Lloyd, talked about the adverse impact of Meta, which set up nicely Nick Clegg’s talk on his book How to Save the Internet on Friday evening.

Nick Clegg worked for many years as Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer. Meta is currently facing many lawsuits, and some of these centre on taking the work of artists without payment or permission in breach of copyright legislation. Copyright is central to how artists make their work. It is through copyright that they can earn money from the work they have created. And remember that many creators earn very little, less than the average wage in the UK.

So copyright lies at the heart of being able to earn a basic income as a musician, author, photographer etc.

In 2025, Society of Authors (SoA) members demonstrated outside Meta HQ at King’s Cross, after millions of books were allegedly stolen to train Meta’s AI. The allegation was that Meta had used the dataset Library Genesis ‘LibGen’ to train its AI model Llama 3, one of the most notorious online shadow libraries of pirated works (including over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers) as a way to quickly and cheaply access and exploit ‘high-quality LLM training data’.

The audience at St Michael & All Angels Church

Kate Mosse at the time said, “‘For writers, and all those who make a living by their hard work, originality and imagination, this is another David & Goliath moment. Copyright exists, the terms and licensing provisions are robust, the law is clear. This is theft on a large scale and it must stop. Fair is fair.’”

So I went along hoping for answers from Nick Clegg. What I got instead were generalities, vacuous statements and fact-free assertions. Given his insider knowledge of BigTech, his refusal to engage in any way with the moral issues of data theft and the consequent loss of jobs and livelihoods was shocking. I could not believe how misleading his talk was, so I had to ask a question.

What I wanted to know was whether, given everything Meta had been doing – stealing the works of creators without payment or permission, known as scraping – he thought that Meta should comply with UK copyright legislation. Nick said yes – but went on to say that Meta was just taking stuff in the public domain. I was gobsmacked. A book in the public domain is still likely to be protected by copyright, so before it can be legally ingested into an AI model, permission needs to be obtained and payment made.

I thought perhaps Nick just did not understand the basics of copyright law, so afterwards I went up to him and gave him a copy of the well-regarded report Brave New World? Justice for Creators in the Age of Gen AI, published in January 2026.

My organisation, together with Equity, the Society of Authors, the Association of Illustrators and the Association of Photographers, collated the evidence of more than 10,000 creators across music, writing, photography and performance, and it is one of the most comprehensive studies of the adverse impact of GenAI on creative work in the UK.

It found that one in three creative jobs have already been lost to AI, 99% of creators say their work has been scraped without consent, a third of illustrators report lost commissions or cancelled projects due to GenAI, more than half of authors have seen work disappear and, among musicians, 73% say unregulated GenAI threatens their ability to earn a living.

I thought Nick could benefit from reading the report. His response was immediate – Nick said he would not read it. So I asked him if he cared about creativity. He said he did, but that he was more focused on tech companies. So there you have it.

You can read the report Nick has refused to read here:ism.org/brave-new-world

To recover, I went to listen to the brilliant Baroness Beeban Kidron talk about her book USERS: How Big Tech Took Control and How To Fight Back. Beeban wrote the foreword to Brave New World and worked throughout 2025 with creators in the UK to stop the Government taking apart our gold-standard copyright legislation so that US Big Tech could help itself to the works of creators without any kind of restraint.

This policy would have destroyed our incredibly valuable creative industries – worth £140bn – and the lives of the 2.4m creators who work in them.

Beeban’s talk was shocking, and she urged us all to take action – her moral purpose was plain for all to see. Beeban’s book is wise and cogent – and it is also the truth. Please do read it. And also read Brave New World to see just how devastating GenAI is for our creators.

The Nick Clegg session was sponsored by the Arts Society, Chiswick.