1,000 artists release ‘silent’ album to protest UK copyright sell-out to AI

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,” protesting planned changes to copyright law — changes the artists say will make it easier to train AI on copyrighted work, without licensing or paying for it. 

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.”

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. 

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 with wife 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 entice more companies to operate out of the U.K., the government is proposing to allow outfits that are training AI 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 thinks this effectively creates a lose-lose situation for artists since there is no opt-out method in place, or 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% [to] 95% of people’s work to AI companies. That’s without a doubt.”

The solution, says artists, is to produce work in other markets where there might be better protections for it. 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.”

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.