Getty Images CEO, Craig Peters, has called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to support the UK’s creative industries or gamble everything on artificial intelligence (AI).

Peters, who has headed up the image library since 2019, spoke out in response to pressure from the creative media industry regarding the appropriation of media materials for “training” data for AI companies.

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He said: “When I look at the UK, probably about 10% of its GDP is sitting in the creative industries, whether that’s movies, television.”

“I think that making that trade-off is risky. If I’m in the UK, betting on AI, less than a quarter point of GDP in the UK today, significantly less than the creative industries, is a bit of a perplexing trade-off.”

The comments come as Getty Images is suing an AI image generator for copyright infringement in the US and UK.

The news comes as around 62% of marketers have said generative AI will augment human creativity, enhancing unique human qualities such as intuition, emotion, and context understanding, according to new research.

According to Capgemini Research Institute’s latest report ‘GenAI and the evolving role of marketing: A CMO’s Playbook’, organisations are already investing in the tool, with 62% of their total marketing technology budget being spent towards it.