Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey does not anticipate that artificial intelligence (AI) will be a “mass destroyer of jobs”.

Speaking to the BBC, the central bank’s top decision maker said that UK financial institutions are seeing the “great potential” of the tech, with almost a third telling the BoE that they had made significant AI investments in the past year.

The BoE had previously touted AI’s capacity for “containing recruitment and labour costs".

Bailey told the BBC: "I'm an economic historian, before I became a central banker. Economies adapt, jobs adapt, and we learn to work with it. And I think, you get a better result by people with machines than with machines on their own. So I'm an optimist…"

The House of Lords’ Communications and Digital Committee on Friday published its report into large language models and generative AI which argues that the UK risks missing out on the significant economic benefits of AI without shifting to “a more positive vision for the opportunities and a more deliberate focus on near‑term risks”.

The report also waves away “sci‑fi scenarios of a robot apocalypse” which it says “remain implausible”.

Presenting the report, Baroness Stowell suggested that regulators in the UK should be more lax with regulating the technology in order to avoid major developers setting up their bases in other countries. She said: “No expert on safety is going to be credible if we are not at the same time developers and part of the real vanguard of promoting and creating the progress on this technology.”

The EU published its landmark rules on regulating AI in December, with German lawmakers giving the legislation their blessing this week.

The Committee has also highlighted the other major area of contention regarding AI and LLMs – copyright. A number of major AI tech firms are facing legal action from rights holders over claims that content produced by algorithms which had been trained on copyrighted works constitutes theft.

Stowell said that the government cannot “sit on its hands” and allow developers to “exploit” rights holders, telling the BBC that "the government needs to come out with its position” on the matter.

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