An AI summit at Manchester's Beyond The Music festival produced a rights-based plan built on credit, consent and payment for creators, while speakers urged a UK sovereign model and provenance tools.
An AI summit held this month at Manchester's Beyond The Music festival produced a set of guidelines called the 'Manchester Principles', according to NME. They start from the idea that 'art is a human right' and that creators have a moral and material claim to be credited and paid for their work. The text is billed as a first-of-its-kind, industry-wide and rights-based roadmap meant to align creators, rights-holders, tech platforms, AI labs and policymakers on generative AI regulation. Greater Manchester Mayor Bev Craig told the audience that the question is how technological progress can lead to social change that protects creativity. Creative Industries Minister Ian Murray said 66 per cent of music creators believe AI poses a direct threat, adding that creators should not have to choose between innovation and protecting their rights.
Several speakers set out their own proposals. Clive Dickens, founder of The Meliora Company, argued for a 'Fair GPT' standard in which models are fairly governed, powered and trained, with consent, provenance and payment mandatory for source material. He floated a UK sovereign model, hypothetically named 'Hope V.1', built by November 2027 when Manchester hosts the next G20 summit. Baroness Beeban Kidron, who campaigned in the House of Lords for AI firms to disclose use of copyright-protected works, said the threat to creators is existential and named three pillars: ownership and consent, transparency and traceability, and fair licensing and new markets.
On the technology side, Andrew Melchior, CEO of Genotone, said his company is developing inaudible provenance markers and watermarks to show the human origin and authorship of recorded music, and called for clarity and standardised tools rather than walled gardens. UK Music chief executive Tom Kiehl described mass scraping, consent, deepfakes and AI-generated 'slop' as huge issues that are deeply personal to artists. The Principles and the ideas floated at the summit are proposals from industry figures, not law, and no binding regulation was announced at the event.
