Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and 1,000 Musicians Protest AI with a New Silent Album

The excellent news is that an album has simply been launched by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn of Goril­laz, The Conflict, Tori Amos, Hans Zim­mer, Pet Store Boys, Jamiro­quai, and Yusuf (pre­vi­ous­ly often known as Cat Stevens), Bil­ly Ocean, and many oth­er musi­cians moreover, most of them British. The dangerous information is that it con­tains no actu­al music. However the album, titled Is This What We Need?, has been cre­at­ed in hopes of pre­vent­ing even worse information: the gov­ern­ment of the Unit­ed King­dom choos­ing to let arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence com­pa­nies prepare their mod­els on copy­proper­ed work with­out a license.

Such a transfer, within the phrases of the professional­jec­t’s chief Ed New­ton-Rex, “would hand the life’s work of the nation’s musi­cians to AI com­pa­nies, without spending a dime, let­ting these 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 nicely.

“The gov­ern­males­t’s will­ing­ness to agree to those copy­proper modifications exhibits how a lot our work is underneath­val­ued and that there is no such thing as a professional­tec­tion for one in every of this coun­attempt’s most impor­tant property: music,” Kate Bush writes on her personal net­web site. “Every monitor on this album fea­tures a desert­ed document­ing stu­dio. Doesn’t that silence say all of it?”

As the Guardian’s Dan Mil­mo experiences, “it’s underneath­stood that Kate Bush has document­ed one of many dozen tracks in her stu­dio.” These tracks, whose titles add as much as the phrase “The British gov­ern­ment should not legalise music theft to ben­e­match AI com­pa­nies,” aren’t strict­ly silent: in a person­ner which may nicely have happy John Cage, they con­tain a vari­ety of ambi­ent nois­es, from foot­steps to hum­ming machin­ery to go­ing vehicles to cry­ing infants to imprecise­ly musi­cal sounds ema­nat­ing from some­the place within the dis­tance. What­ev­er its influ­ence on the U.Ok. gov­ern­males­t’s delib­er­a­tions, Is This What We Need? (the title Sounds of Silence hav­ing pre­sum­ably been unavail­in a position) could have pio­neered a brand new style: protest track with­out the songs.

You’ll be able to stream Is This What We Need? on Spo­ti­fy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Artwork & the Way forward for Cre­ativ­i­ty: Watch the Closing Chap­ter of the “Each­factor is a Remix” Collection

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

Watch John Cage’s 4′33″ Performed by Musi­cians Across the World

Chat­G­PT Writes a Music within the Type 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 Excessive-Tech Pla­gia­rism” and “a Means of Keep away from­ing Study­ing”

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social web­work for­mer­ly often known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.