Is This What We Want features recordings of empty studios, performance spaces, highlighting danger to creative trade.
More than 1,000 musicians, including Kate Bush, Cat Stevens and Annie Lennox, have released a silent album in protest of the proposed changes to British copyright laws around artificial intelligence (AI), which they warned could lead to legalised music theft.
The album, titled Is This What We Want, was launched on Tuesday and features recordings of empty studios and performance spaces, as backlash against the plan grows in the United Kingdom.
The proposed changes would allow AI developers to train their models on any material to which they have lawful access, and would require creators to proactively opt out to stop their work from being used.
Critics, including the artists participating in the silent album, say it would reverse the principle of copyright law, which grants exclusive control to creators over their work.
The emergence of AI has posed a threat to the creative industry, including music, raising legal and ethical questions on a new technological platform that could produce its own output without paying creators of original content.
Bush and other writers and musicians denounced the proposals in UK law as a “wholesale giveaway” to Silicon Valley in a letter to The Times newspaper.
Ed Newton-Rex, organiser of the project, said musicians were “united in their thorough condemnation of this ill-thought-through plan”.
In a very rare move, UK newspapers also highlighted their concerns, launching a campaign featuring wrap-around advertisements on the front of almost every national daily, with an inside editorial by the papers’ editors.
A public consultation on the legal changes will close later on Tuesday.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer wants to become a superpower in the AI industry. Responding to the album, a government spokesperson said the current copyright and AI regime was holding back the creative industries from “realising their full potential”.
