More than 1,000 musicians including Kate Bush and Cat Stevens on Tuesday released a silent album to protest proposed changes to Britain’s copyright laws which could allow tech firms to train artificial intelligence models using their work.
Creative industries globally are grappling with the legal and ethical implications of AI models that can produce their own output after being trained on popular works without necessarily paying the creators of the original content.
Britain, which Prime Minister Keir Starmer wants to become an AI superpower, has proposed relaxing laws that currently give creators of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works the right to control the ways their material may be used.
Photo: AP
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 being used.
The changes have been heavily criticized by many artists, who say it would reverse the principle of copyright law, which grants exclusive control to creators for their work.
“In the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?,” said Bush, whose 1985 hit Running Up That Hill enjoyed a resurgence in 2022 thanks to Netflix show Stranger Things.
The co-written album titled Is This What We Want? features recordings of empty studios and performance spaces to represent what organizers say is the potential impact on artists’ livelihoods should the changes go ahead.
A public consultation on the legal changes closes later on Tuesday.
Responding to the album, a government spokesperson said the current copyright and AI regime was holding back the creative industries, media and AI sector from “realizing their full potential.”
“We have engaged extensively with these sectors throughout and will continue to do so. No decisions have been taken,” the spokesperson said, adding that the government’s proposals will be set out in due course.
Annie Lennox, Billy Ocean, Hans Zimmer, Tori Amos and The Clash are among the musicians urging the government to review its plans.
“The government’s proposal 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,” said organizer Ed Newton-Rex, the founder of Fairly Trained, a non-profit that certifies generative AI companies for fairer training data practices.
“The UK can be leaders in AI without throwing our world-leading creative industries under the bus.”
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
A town in Japan is to urge all residents to restrict their smartphone use to two hours a day in an attempt to tackle online addiction and sleep deprivation. Officials in Toyoake, Aichi prefecture, said the measure would target not only children but also adults, amid growing concern about the physical and psychological toll excessive smartphone use is taking on people of all ages. The move aims “to prevent excessive use of devices causing physical and mental health issues … including sleep problems,” the mayor, Masafumi Koki said recently. The Toyoake municipal assembly began debating the non-binding ordinance this week ahead of a
RSS