Politician after politician, of all stripes, has talked about the transformative power of artificial intelligence. They say we must embrace it and invest – that AI has the potential to transform Britain into a global superpower. But why are they not acknowledging and promoting something we are already extremely good at? We are world leaders in the arts. And yet these skills and creativity are perceived as “soft”. Nobody seems to talk about them.

That makes no sense to me. The creative industries bring in huge investment, contributing around £124 billion a year to our economy and employing around 2.4 million people across the UK. And then there’s the knock-on effect to our hospitality and tourism industries from visits to our museums, concerts and theatres, from Shakespeare to the Edinburgh Fringe.

From a single idea, there’s a ripple effect – just take my How to Train Your Dragon books, published here in Britain, as an example. Our first live-action spin-off, released last year, was filmed at the Titanic Studios in Northern Ireland. I’ve just returned from Elstree, where the sequel is being shot.

Mason Thames is Hiccup and Cate Blanchett his mother Valka, but most of the other actors are British, as is the composer, John Powell. The CGI dragons are being created here, and the post-production will take place here, too. Our soundtrack is being recorded at AIR Studios, founded by Sir George Martin.

The laws don’t protect our work from AI

These films, and the animated trilogy that preceded them, began life with my first How to Train Your Dragon book, published in 2003. My new book, Fight of the Flamestrike, featuring Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third and his dragons Toothless and Windwalker, is the second in a new series for developing readers. Britain exports more physical books than any other country, even more than the United States. In other areas, too, from music to theatre and museums and galleries, we punch above our weight. And on television, our formats – from The Piano to Taskmaster – are snapped up around the globe. The extent to which we outperform our size on the world stage is astonishing.

So why are we pinning all our hopes on AI – with all its associated risks and uncertainty – and not shouting about our creative industries?

It saddens me that we don’t value the arts, and that’s abundantly clear when it comes to our education system. The purpose of education should be to raise a well-rounded human being, and the arts are intrinsic to that. Now it’s about ticking boxes and, like Thomas Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, filling children’s heads with facts. At GCSE, art entries have declined by 47 per cent since 2010. Why don’t we value art, music and drama so that our children can have empathy and thrive?

We know how important creativity is, how it affects how children can think about Stem subjects – science, technology, engineering and maths. With AI, I would have thought that would become even more important. AI cannot think creatively! We need creative doctors, scientists and mathematicians.

My own view of AI is tarnished by the fact that the huge tech companies are scraping people’s creativity, years and years of work, without permission. That comes at the expense of our powerhouse creative economy. How are they allowed to get away with it? What’s the incentive for authors and illustrators of the future? Why do the laws of copyright not protect this from happening? The government must protect UK creativity. We must protect it and we must also shout about it. Remember what we are good at. And let’s celebrate it.