The U.K. government wants to move full steam ahead on big plans to use and build AI across the country, but not everyone is marching to the beat of its drum. On Monday, a group of 1,000 musicians released a “silent album”, in protest of planned changes to copyright law — changes the artists say will make it easier to train AI on copyrighted work, without licensing (nor paying for) it.
The album — titled “Is This What We Want?” — features tracks from Kate Bush, contemporary classical composers Max Richter and Thomas Hewitt Jones, and Imogen Heap, among others, with co-writing credits from hundreds more, including big names like Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, Billy Ocean, The Clash, Mystery Jets, Yusuf / Cat Stevens, Riz Ahmed, Tori Amos, and Hans Zimmer.
But this is not Band Aid part 2. And it’s not a collection of music.
Instead, the artists have put together recordings of empty studios and performance spaces — a symbolic representation of what they believe will be the impact of the planned copyright law changes.
“You can hear my cats moving around,” is how Hewitt Jones described his contribution to the album. “I have two cats in my studio who bother me all day when I’m working.”
To put an even more blunt point on it, the titles of the 12 tracks that make up the album spell out a message: “The British government must not legalize music theft to benefit AI companies.”
The album is the latest move in the U.K. (there are similar protests underway in other markets like the U.S.) to bring attention to the issue of how copyright is being handled in AI training.
Ed Newton-Rex, who organized the project, has been leading a bigger campaign against AI training without licensing.
It’s a position that’s picked up steam among artists who are freaked out about the encroaching presence of AI. A petition he started has now been signed by more than 47,000 writers, visual artists, actors, and others in the creative industries, with nearly 10,000 of that figure signing up in just the last five weeks since the U.K. government announced its big AI strategy.
Newton-Rex said he has also been “running a nonprofit in AI for the last year where we’ve been certifying companies that, you know, basically don’t scrape and train on great work without permission.”
Newton-Rex arrived at advocating for artists having batted for both sides. Classically trained as a composer, he later built a startup — not just any startup, but an AI-based music composition platform called Jukedeck that (yes) let people bypass using copyrighted works by creating their own. Its catchy pitch (where he rapped and riffed on the virtues of using AI to write music) won the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield competition in 2015. Jukedeck was eventually acquired by TikTok, where he worked for some time on music services.
After several years at other tech companies like Snap and Stability, Newton-Rex is back to considering how to build the future without burning the past. He’s contemplating that idea from a pretty interesting vantage point: He now lives in the Bay Area (his wife is Alice Newton-Rex, VP of product at WhatsApp).
The album release comes just ahead of planned changes to copyright law in the U.K. In a nutshell, in order to encourage more AI activity, and to get more companies to set up and operate out of the U.K., the government is proposing to allow those training models to use artists’ work without permission or payment.
Artists who do not want their work used will have to proactively “opt out” if they do not want their work included.
Newton-Rex, however, thinks this effectively creates a lose-lose situation for artists, since there is no opt-out method in place, nor any clear way of being able to track what specific material has been fed into any AI system.
“We know that opt-out schemes are just not taken up,” he said. “This is just going to give 90, 95% of people’s work to AI companies. That’s without a doubt.”
The solution? Produce work in other markets where there might be better protections for it, musicians say. Hewitt Jones — who threw a working keyboard into a harbor in Kent at an in-person protest not long ago (he fished it out, broken, afterwards) — said he’s considering markets like Switzerland for distributing his music in the future.
But the rock and hard place of a harbor in Kent are nothing compared to the Wild West of the internet.
“We’ve been told for decades to share our work online, because it’s good for exposure. But now AI companies and, incredibly, governments are turning around and saying, ‘Well, you put that online for free …” Newton-Rex said. “So now artists are just stopping making and sharing their work. A number of artists have contacted me to say this is what they’re doing.”
Or not doing, as the case may be.
The album will be posted widely on music platforms sometime Tuesday, the organizers said, and any donations or proceeds from playing it will go to the charity Help Musicians.
