In the UK on February 25, public consultation concluded around the government’s decision to revive what Forbes describes as “a controversial proposal to grant AI companies unrestricted access to copyrighted material for training their models”.
The proposal was introduced in 2022, but the public backlash caused the authorities to pause the plan in 2023. Now it’s back. This proposed change to copyright laws makes it legal for AI companies to engage in the mass scraping of artistic works, and as you would expect there’s been an outcry from the creative industry.
The government insists this new copyright exception is for the good of the creative industry. According to the BBC, a spokesperson for the department for science, innovation & technology said the UK’s “current regime for copyright and AI is holding back the creative industries, media and AI sector from realising their full potential — and that cannot continue”. The government also claimed that the new approach would strike a balance between AI developers and rights holders.
Let’s remind ourselves who some of the personalities are behind the AI companies that benefit from unfettered, free access to copyrighted works for training. There’s the new presidential concubine, Elon Musk, and there’s the head of OpenAI, Sam Altman. Peter Thiel, the conservative libertarian, is also an advocate for loosening regulations so that the big US companies can use protected content without the need to pay anything to the content’s actual creators. All of them Trump toadies now, of course, and all of them with a blithe belief that AI companies should take precedence over humans.
Forbes is quite forthright about the new law. “In practice, this overwhelming dependence on copyrighted content without consent constitutes a clear violation of intellectual property rights. Instead, this proposed law is a blatant attempt to appease big tech firms at the expense of the creative industries that contribute billions to the UK economy.”
The creative industries agree, and in protest against the threat to the livelihoods of artists posed by AI, a thousand musicians have joined forces to release a silent album called Is This What We Want?
The project’s website describes it.
“In late 2024, the UK government proposed changing copyright law to allow AI companies to build their products using other people’s copyrighted work — music, artworks, text and more — without a licence. The musicians on this album came together to protest this. The album consists of recordings of empty studios and performance spaces, representing the impact we expect the government’s proposals would have on musicians’ livelihoods.”
Among the thousand artists are luminaries including Annie Lennox, Kate Bush, The Clash, Billy Ocean and Damon Albarn, though I note that the roster also includes someone named Nathan Fake, which I can only assume is an AI ringer planted there by big tech. Other artists who have spoken out against the proposal include Ed Sheeran, Paul McCartney, Sting and Dua Lipa. Forbes quotes Simon Cowell, perhaps ironically, as calling it “one of the biggest moments and decisions of our time”, warning that “AI shouldn’t be able to steal the talent of those humans who created the magic in the first place”.
Aficionados of silence as an art form will immediately think of the modernist experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992), and his notorious/celebrated 1952 composition named 4’33”, popularly described as four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. The piece was composed for any combination of instruments and is in three movements. The score instructs performers not to play their instruments throughout the three movements.
The whole thing lasts, as you might imagine, for four minutes and 33 seconds. Like the recordings included on Is This What We Want?, it’s not strictly silence, as it includes ambient sounds which contribute to the performance.
I attended a performance of 4’33” in Cape Town many years ago, and it’s a powerful experience. I see, via a Guardian article, that journalist Brooks Spector gave a performance in Joburg in 2015, previewed as “an American sits at a piano before a South African audience, leaves the keys untouched and concentrates fantastically hard on not making a sound for more than four a half minutes. He is one sneeze away from disaster.” Wish I’d seen that one. The Guardian also relates that, “according to the Cage scholar Larry Solomon, 4’33” was conceived as a response to canned music: the muzak played in department stores or lifts is typically about 4½ minutes long”.
The tracks all have one-word titles, and the listing spells out the message: ‘The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies’
It seems a trifle poignant that one of the great pieces of modernist music was created, in part, as a protest against canned music — the bland, unappetising background music played in lifts and shopping malls. And we will note, via Wikipedia, that muzak was created in the US as an alternative to radio, and was, like AI, a technical solution. Inventor George Owen Squier “was granted several US patents in the 1920s related to transmission of information signals, among them [a patent for] a system for the transmission and distribution of signals over electrical lines”.
4’33” wasn’t just a protest “song”, if it even really is one. Cage had strong musical reasons for creating it. From Wikipedia: “He increasingly began to see silence as an integral part of music since it allows for sounds to exist in the first place — to interpenetrate each other.
“The prevalence of silence in a composition also allowed the opportunity for contemplation on one’s psyche and surroundings … As he began to realise the impossibility of absolute silence, Cage affirmed the psychological significance of ‘lack of sound’ in a musical composition: ‘I’ve thought of music as a means of changing the mind … In being themselves, [sounds] open the minds of people who made them or listened to them to other possibilities that they had not previously considered.’”
In this spirit, I listened to the 12 pieces of silence on Is This What We Want? The tracks all have one-word titles, and the listing spells out the message: “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies”.
I think my favourite track on the album is British, which has a threnodic hum to it, and includes what sounds like a fly buzzing, or possibly a mosquito, and is interspersed with footsteps. The breathing and swallowing on Government is also pretty effective, if you prefer your silence with a bit of humanness.
Track 11, the 3:36 AI, I found a little disappointing. I was expecting, perhaps unfairly, a more technology-forward timbre. There is a slight machine buzz breakthrough at around three minutes, but it doesn’t really help the song coalesce.
And yes, obviously the above faux review is nonsense. But what it does point to is the all too human impulse to make sense of things, to create meaning out of art. Would it be too fanciful to suggest that this is where we are going to end up, with the inexorability of human sense-making meeting the inevitability of AI-created art?
On a visit to the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, the year before he composed 4’33”, “Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he later wrote: ‘I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.’ Cage had gone to a place where he expected total silence, yet heard sound. ‘Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.’”
In one way, as consumers of art, we could find this reassuring. Even with the growing dominance of AI, we’ll still have music. We’ll just find new ways to engage with that music. But for the thousands of creatives who are going to have to suffer as we make our way to this inevitable future, that’s not going to be reassuring at all.
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