Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and 1,000 Musicians Protest AI with a New Silent Album
The good news is that an album has just been released by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn of Gorillaz, The Clash, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, Pet Shop Boys, Jamiroquai, and Yusuf (previously known as Cat Stevens), Billy Ocean, and many other musicians besides, most of them British. The bad news is that it contains no actual music. But the album, titled Is This What We Want?, has been created in hopes of preventing even worse news: the government of the United Kingdom choosing to let artificial-intelligence companies train their models on copyrighted work without a license. Such a move, in the words of the project’s leader Ed Newton-Rex, “would hand the life’s work of the country’s musicians to AI companies, for free, letting those companies exploit musicians’ work to outcompete them.” As a composer, he naturally has an interest in these matters, and as a “former AI executive,” he presumably has insider knowledge about them as well. “The government’s willingness to agree to these copyright changes shows how much our work is undervalued and …