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 that there is no pro­tec­tion for one of this coun­try’s most impor­tant assets: music,” Kate Bush writes on her own web­site. “Each track on this album fea­tures a desert­ed record­ing stu­dio. Doesn’t that silence say it all?”

As the Guardian’s Dan Mil­mo reports, “it is under­stood that Kate Bush has record­ed one of the dozen tracks in her stu­dio.” Those tracks, whose titles add up to the phrase “The British gov­ern­ment must not legalise music theft to ben­e­fit AI com­pa­nies,” aren’t strict­ly silent: in a man­ner that might well have pleased John Cage, they con­tain a vari­ety of ambi­ent nois­es, from foot­steps to hum­ming machin­ery to pass­ing cars to cry­ing babies to vague­ly musi­cal sounds ema­nat­ing from some­where in the dis­tance. What­ev­er its influ­ence on the U.K. gov­ern­men­t’s delib­er­a­tions, Is This What We Want? (the title Sounds of Silence hav­ing pre­sum­ably been unavail­able) may have pio­neered a new genre: protest song with­out the songs.

You can stream Is This What We Want? on Spo­ti­fy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Art & the Future of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Watch the Final Chap­ter of the “Every­thing is a Remix” Series

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Cre­ativ­i­ty Machine Learns to Play Beethoven in the Style of The Bea­t­les’ “Pen­ny Lane”

Watch John Cage’s 4′33″ Played by Musi­cians Around the World

Chat­G­PT Writes a Song in the Style of Nick Cave–and Nick Cave Calls it “a Grotesque Mock­ery of What It Is to Be Human”

Noam Chom­sky on Chat­G­PT: It’s “Basi­cal­ly High-Tech Pla­gia­rism” and “a Way of Avoid­ing Learn­ing”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.