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A new ‘silent album’ featuring the likes of Kate Bush and Damon Albarn is taking aim at UK government plans that would allow tech companies to mine the work of creatives.
Over a thousand artists, including Kate Bush and Annie Lennox, have come together to release a unique album – it’s silent from start to finish.
Titled ‘Is This What We Want?’, the 12-track release is a direct protest against proposed changes to UK copyright laws that would allow artificial intelligence (AI) companies to train their models on using creative works without the creators’ consent.
The legislation was first raised in December last year, and is intended to support generative AI development by making copyrighted material freely available for machine learning.
The government argues that this will boost innovation and establish the UK as a global leader in AI technology. But for musicians, writers, and visual artists, the implications are a fundamental erasure of creativity – an undoing of the universal understanding that creative labour deserves recognition and compensation.
The silent album intends to draw attention to the potential impact on the livelihoods of those in the industry – particularly those from marginalised backgrounds that already face huge obstacles when breaking through.
‘In the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?’ Kate Bush said in a statement.
All proceeds from the record will be donated to the Help Musicians charity, which works to help creatives thrive no matter their background or what point they’re at in their careers.
It’s an elegant form of resistance, making absence itself the presence. Across 12 eerily quiet tracks, the record predicts how a future might look if human creativity is treated as raw material for technological refinement.
The tracklisting for the record simply spells out the message ‘The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies.’
Those involved in the project are keen to highlight that this is no distant threat. AI-generated music already infiltrates streaming services on a daily basis; AI-generated writing blurs the lines of authorship; visual artists witness their work replicated to no recourse.
And as the power of these tools grows exponentially, the need for adequate policing and clear regulations is paramount.
The risk is that AI will grow too powerful before we make time to respond. The government’s proposed policy doesn’t merely expose artists to this kind of exploitation, but accelerates the dissolution of artistic autonomy altogether.
Proponents of AI often frame it as a democratising force that has the capacity to expand creative horizons and cut out unnecessary labour for everyone in the industry – across all industries, for that matter.
