Thousands of artists, including musicians from ABBA, The Cure and Radiohead, have recently inked a protest letter against using creatives’ work to train aritificial intelligence tools.
The Cure, Radiohead and more protest
Musicians, actors, and authors, inked the letter warning against the mining of their artistry, in what is the latest outcry about AI tools that can spit out synthetic images, music, and writings after being trained on huge troves of human-made works.
“The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted,” says the statement.
Among the 13,500 signatories are Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Thom Yorke and his Radiohead bandmates, and composers John Rutter and Max Richter.
Other industry figures have also signed the statement. They are writers including Nobel-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, Emma Donoghue, Ian Rankin, James Patterson, Ted Chiang and Joanne Harris, as well as actors Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, Rosario Dawson and Kate McKinnon.
After the release of the statement, Gee Davy, the interim CEO of the Association of Independent Music said: “On behalf of the UK’s independent music community – businesses who are proud to work in partnership with artists – we support this statement from Fairly Trained.”
“To achieve the benefits of AI for creativity, we urge policymakers not to lose sight of the need for strong copyright protections,” he added. “This is vital to ensure a healthy future for those who create, invest in and release music across genres and all communities, regions and nations of the UK.”
This statement follows ongoing legal issues between the creative world and tech firms over the use of their work to train artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT. Several artists have already spoken out about the use of AI in their fields, including Nick Cave, who has previously called ChatGPT songwriting “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human” and labelled the impact of AI in music as “unbelievably disturbing.”
