March 14, 2025/Midnight
Erie, PA. – On Feb. 25, more than 1,000 artists released a silent album in protest of the UK government’s proposal to change copyright law.
Titled Is This What We Want?, this special album draws public attention to the significance of AI and its impact on artists and the music industry.
According to The Guardian, the new proposal would allow tech firms to freely use copyrighted work to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. However, creative professionals and related rights holders could reserve their jobs by choosing to opt out of the process.
The album, backed by prominent names such as Kate Bush, Billy Ocean, and The Clash, features ambient noises rather than music. The 12-track album includes soundbites of footsteps on a hardwood floor, computer mouse clicks, and occasional sights, all evoking empty recording spaces. The track listing for the album spells out a straightforward message: “The British government must not legalize music theft to benefit AI companies.”
“In the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?” Kate Bush said in a statement.
The clash between tech firms and artists over AI and its impacts on copyrighted and creative works has become a heated debate. Generative AI models rely on vast amounts of data to generate their responses, a process often referred to as data mining. The main sources of data are open sources, including content from Wikipedia, newspaper articles, and online book archives. Based on this enormous amount of text, images, or music, generative AI programs can produce human-like responses. This has worried creative professionals, including musicians, writers, and visual artists, as their work is being utilized for free to build AI tools that create works in direct competition with their own.
In response to the album, a UK government spokesperson stated that no decisions have been made and promised to build greater transparency over the material being used.
While ministers state that there would be an “opt-out” option for artists who don’t want to share their works for machine learning purposes, artists argue that this option won’t provide sufficient control over their creative materials. It would be nearly impossible for an individual artist or songwriter to notify thousands of different AI service providers of their preferences and to monitor their works across the vast digital landscape.
In an interview with the BBC, Paul McCartney, one of the two surviving members of The Beatles, stated that the proposed change could improve musicians and artists.
“You get young guys, girls, coming up, and they write a beautiful song, and they don’t own it,” McCartney said. “They don’t have anything to do with it. And anyone who wants can just rip it off. The truth is the money’s going somewhere. Somebody’s getting paid, so why shouldn’t it be the guy who sat down and wrote ‘Yesterday’?”
While believing in AI’s potential to create new music, McCartney said that it should not “rip creative people off.”
On the other side of the spectrum, tech firms admit that it would be impossible to train AI without the use of copyrighted materials. TechUK, a trade body representing tech firms, states that the complex relationship between AI and copyright law “creates uncertainty for both creators and tech innovators.”
