Jeremy Hunt is persuaded of the magnifier effect of public money in creative industries. He’s promised £77 million to film, fashion, TV and video game firms on the basis that the sector already brings in more than £100 billion in a year in tax revenues and that the new money will help grow it by a third and create a million extra jobs by 2030. Where these projections come from and what conflations are performed to reach them are unclear from the FT’s report, but two points are worth making. First, to the extent that any of this money will enable production companies to embrace AI it could clearly pump-prime rapid growth. The race to pour money into anything with AI in its subtitle has already produced a record $113 million fundraising round for the French startup Mistral this week. But second, there is no equivalent tradition or expectation of tax-funded leg-ups in the US, and its creative sector dwarfs all others.
