The chief executive of Channel 4 said that artificial intelligence companies are “scraping the value” out of the UK’s £125bn creative industries, and urged the government to take action.

Alex Mahon told MPs that if the government pursues its proposed plan to give AI companies access to creative works unless the copyright holder opts out, it would put the UK creative industries in a “dangerous position”.

Speaking on the work of Channel 4 at a culture, media and sport select committee meeting on Tuesday, she said: “AI is clearly absolutely critical to the future of our industry, and many industries. The debate of the day is we need very clear terms. UK copyright law is very, very clear. And what is happening at the moment is the scraping of value from our creative industries.”

Critics of the government’s opt-out proposal, issued in a consultation that closed in February, argue that it is unfair and impractical.

Generative AI models, the term for technology that underpins powerful tools such as ChatGPT, are trained on vast amounts of data to generate highly realistic responses.

Mahon said that allowing large language models (LLMs) to continue to freely scrape data poses a big threat to the creative industry, which generates £125bn in gross value added (GVA), a measure of how much value companies add through the goods and services they produce.

“The creative industries account for 6% of the UK’s GVA and is growing 1.5 times faster than other sectors,” she said. “If we continue in a world where LLMs can scrape and use that data without paying for it properly we are in a dangerous position for the industry.”

Authors, artists and executives from the film and TV industries are among those to have argued that allowing companies to train AI programs on their works without a licence posed a threat to their livelihoods.

Mahon said Channel 4 was “very clear” that the copyright regime should be “opt-in”.

She said: “The burden should be on them, not us. We are very clear we think that LLMs need to licence what they use and pay properly for it. We can’t have automated scraping; we need a proper payment and licensing regime.”

Mahon also said that Channel 4 – which is state-owned but fully commercially funded, primarily through advertising revenue – said that the broadcaster broke even last year.

The broadcaster, which will release its 2024 results in the summer, reported a deficit of £52m in 2023.

This followed three years of financial surpluses, totalling £178m. Mahon said at last year’s results press conference that she expected deficits in 2024 and this year.

“I’m pleased to say that 2024 was a much better year,” she said. “We [will be] pretty much on a flat deficit [when we report]. Pretty much breakeven.”

Mahon also said that regulations governing the programming prominence that public service broadcasters [PSBs] such as Channel 4, the BBC and ITV enjoy on TV platforms may need to be extended.

“Without prominence we will disappear,” she said. “We need to think about reach and prominence on new platforms. We do need to think about regulation over time for promotion [of PSBs] rather than just preservation [of them]. We should think about how to extend prominence [regulations] to social platforms and how we would do that in the UK.”