Your commercial news round-up: mortgage rates, Hollywood strikes, AI and the music industry, period pants

Reading time: three minutes

We look at AI’s impact on Hollywood and the music industry this week. Plus, are mortgage rates on the way down and will the government act on calls to remove VAT from period pants?

Find out more in this week’s commercial news round-up.

• Joining HSBC, Nationwide and TSB, the UK’s biggest mortgage lender Halifax will cut rates on some of its fixed mortgage deals by 0.71 percentage points from Friday. The rate reductions will apply to a range of products offered by Halifax, including some cuts aimed at supporting first-time buyers. Mortgage rates have been on the rise following the Bank of England’s efforts to curb increasing prices by raising interest rates. Aaron Strutt from mortgage broker Trinity Financial said: "Lenders are starting to realise the market is slowing down, and they need to improve pricing to attract more borrowers." This news comes as house prices in Scotland fall for the first time since the pandemic, with Nationwide announcing that UK house prices have decreased at their fastest annual rate for 14 years.
   
• Strikes in Hollywood continue to disrupt the film and TV industry with pay, working conditions and concerns around the impact of AI on writers and actors cited as reasons for the action. Dr Alex Connock, a senior fellow at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, spoke to the Sky News Daily podcast about the use of AI in the creative writing sphere, noting that no true creative writing has yet been produced by such tools. He explains that AI has been “trained on historic documentation that’s been fed in the case of ChatGPT from almost the entire internet”, meaning that it’s learned its behaviours and language from what’s already been written.

Screenwriters have expressed concerns about AI writing preliminary scripts with writers then being asked to “polish them” and “thereby denying them the right as the originator to make really big money on the project”, Connock says. While he recognises this as a “legitimate concern”, he’s quick to add that generative AI is “not really original at all” and questions whether “anyone would be truly entertained by content that was exceptionally derivative”. There are even some conversations around human content becoming “ever more valuable” in the future, so watch this space and, in the meantime, you’ll have to re-watch your favourite Netflix shows or movies until the strike is resolved.

• Sticking with AI for our next story, tech giant Google is reportedly in early talks with some music labels to license artists’ voices and tunes for AI-generated songs. Although none of the companies have spoken about these talks, AI has already had a significant impact on the music industry with the influx of ‘deepfake’ songs, including the use of Frank Sinatra’s voice on a version of ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’. The Financial Times reported that people close to the matter have revealed that the goal is for a tool to be developed that’ll enable fans to legitimately create these tracks, with owners of the copyright receiving payments when their copyrights are used – artists would also be able to opt out.

• Marks & Spencer and Wuka are calling for period pants to be VAT-free to bring the product in line with other sanitary products. In 2021, VAT on pads, tampons and reusable menstrual cups was removed, with the government now being urged to “finish the job”. Currently 20% VAT is applied to period pants due to their classification as garments; however, a letter requesting Victoria Atkins, the financial secretary to the Treasury, to reclassify them as a period product has received nearly 50 signatories, including leaders from the Football Association and the bosses of Ocado.

Check the News every Thursday for this weekly commercial news round-up. Or prefer to listen to your commercial news? Why not check out our brand-new COMMERCIAL CONNECT podcast?        

Follow LawCareers.Net on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram for regular business news updates.