Jack Thorne accuses writers of passing off AI scripts as their own
Some television writers are handing in scripts generated by artificial intelligence, Adolescence co-writer Jack Thorne has alleged.
He made the claim in a speech for the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, the union that represents writers, reported on 14 September 2026 Deadline. The talk was titled Authorship in the Age of AI and was held at London's Southbank Centre Southbank Centre.
Thorne is a British screenwriter and playwright best known for Adolescence and His Dark Materials The Hollywood Reporter. He serves as president of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. The event was billed as an urgent look at what AI means for the future of storytelling, writing and imaginations.
He did not mince words. He said typing prompts into an AI tool instead of writing words cheats both employers and fellow writers. Passing that material off as your own work needs to be unlawful, he said Deadline.
He went further. Using AI to generate content without declaring it is fraud, he said, and companies should be entitled to prosecute. A programme-maker pays a writer to write. A writers' room depends on each person doing their share.
Thorne named two broadcasters directly. He called on the BBC and Channel 4 to take action if they discover AI-generated material passed off as human-written. A writer caught doing it should face professional career consequences, he said. He compared it to students threatened with expulsion from university for submitting AI-written essays.
He also turned to the technology companies behind AI systems. Big tech firms should be compelled to publish their AI training datasets, meaning the books, scripts, articles and other material used to teach the models, with audited summaries of what went in. He called for a regulatory body, a new organisation to monitor the expansion of AI and to suggest government intervention if necessary.
The remarks sit alongside a wider dispute over copyright and AI. Unions and guilds have been challenging the government over a proposed change to copyright law linked to AI Deadline.
What makes this stand out is the focus on the writers' room itself. For viewers at home, a script credit tells them who wrote the story they just watched. Thorne is arguing that credit should mean a person did the writing.
