The U.K. government is pushing forward with plans to attract more AI companies to the region by changing copyright law. The proposed changes would allow developers to train AI models on artists’ content found online — without permission or payment — unless creators proactively "opt out." Not everyone is marching to the same beat, though.
On Monday, a group of 1,000 musicians released a “silent album," protesting the planned changes. The album — titled “Is This What We Want?” — features tracks from Kate Bush, Imogen Heap, and contemporary classical composers Max Richter and Thomas Hewitt Jones, among others. It also features 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.” You can listen for yourself here.
The album is just the latest move in the U.K. to bring attention to the issue of how copyright is being handled in AI training. Similar protests are underway in other markets, like the U.S., highlighting a global concern among artists.
Ed Newton-Rex, who organized the project, has simultaneously been leading a bigger campaign against AI training without licensing. 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 them 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 basically don't scrape and train on great work without permission.”
Newton-Rex arrived at advocating for artists after having batted for both sides. Classically trained as a composer, he later built an AI-based music composition platform called Jukedeck that 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.