The UK government is promoting plans to attract more AI companies to the region, changing the copyright law. The proposed changes would allow developers to train AI models on the content of artists found online – without license or payment – unless preventive creators “leave”. Not everyone goes at the same pace.
On Monday, a group of 1,000 musicians released a “silent album”, protest The scheduled changes. The album – entitled “Is it what we want?” – It has pieces from Kate Bush, Imogen Heap and the modern classic composers Max Richter and Thomas Hewitt Jones, among others. It also has co-authors’ credits from hundredsIncluding big names such as Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, Billy Ocean, Conflict, Jets Mystery, Yusuf / Cat Stevens, Riz Ahmed, Tori Amos and Hans Zimmer.
But this is not the part of the band Part 2 and it is not a collection of music. Instead, artists have gathered records of empty studios and performance spaces – a symbolic representation of what they believe will be the impact of planned changes in copyright law.
“You can hear my cats move around,” is the way Hewitt Jones described his contribution to the album. “I have two cats in my studio that bother me all day when I work.”
To put an even more blunt point in it, the titles of the 12 pieces that make up the album explain a message: “The British government must not legalize music theft to benefit AI companies.”
The album is only the last move in the United Kingdom to pay attention to the question of how copyright is treated in AI education. Similar protests hectare Issues that are at the disposal of spaces in the inter -interoperative manner of the fact that finding In other markets, such as the US, highlighting a global concern among artists.
Ed Newton-Rex, who organized the project, at the same time has a larger campaign against AI training without authorization. A reference It has now begun has been signed by more than 47,000 writers, artists, actors and others in the creative industries, with nearly 10,000 of them signing only in the last five weeks since the UK government announced its major AI strategy.
Newton-Rex has also said he has also “run a non-profit organization at AI for the last year, where we have certified companies that are essentially not scratched and trained in a large job without license”.
Newton-Rex arrived to support the artists after falling for both sides. Classically trained as a composer, he later built a platform for music -based musical composition called Jukedeck, which lets people bypass using copyright -protected works creating their own. His catchy step, where he rushed and fell into the virtues of the use of AI to write music, won the Battlefield TechCrunch competition in 2015. Jukedeck was finally acquired by Tiktok, where he worked for some time at music services.
After several years in other technology companies, such as snap and stability, Newton-Rex returns to examine how to build the future without burning the past. She thinks of this idea from a very interesting advantage: she now lives in the Gulf area with her husband Alice Newton-Rex, VP of the product in Whatsapp.
The liberation of the album comes right in front of the scheduled changes in copyright law in the United Kingdom, who will force artists who do not want their work to be used for AI educational purposes to “leave”.
Newton-Rex believes that this effectively creates a state of loss for artists, as there is no exception or clear way to monitor which particular material has been powered by any AI system.
“We know that exception systems have not been taken,” he said. “This will give 90% [to] 95% of people’s work in AI companies. This is no doubt. ”
The solution, artists say, is to produce work in other markets where there may be better protection for it. Hewitt Jones-who threw a work keyboard in a port in Kent in a personal protest recently (caught, broken, then)-he said he was thinking of markets like Switzerland to distribute his music in the future.
But the rock and hard space of a harbor in Kent is nothing compared to the wild west of the internet.
“We have been told for decades to share our internet work because it is good for report. But now AI companies and, incredibly, governments are turning around and saying,” Well, you put it free on the internet … “said the Newton-Rex. “So now the artists stop doing and sharing their work. Many artists have contacted me to say that this is what they do. ”
The album will be widely posted on music platforms at some point on Tuesday, organizers and donations or revenue from playing it will go to the musicians of charity.
