As you might expect, the protests have been creative, even quirky. More than 1,000 artists, including Annie Lennox and Kate Bush, supported the release this week of a silent album containing nothing more than background studio noise. The 47-minute album called Is This What We Want? contains 12 tracks entitled: The. British. Government. Must. Not. Legalise. Music. Theft. To. Benefit. AI. Companies.
As a musical experience, the album — available on Spotify — is not highly recommended. Personally, I prefer John Cage’s 4’33’’, a three-movement composition in which the orchestra does not play a note, mainly because it’s shorter.
But this mute protest is part of a worldwide revolt by creative artists and content companies against the unauthorised use of their work by big technology firms. In the US, the Authors Guild and 17 individual authors, including Jodi Picoult and Jonathan Franzen, are pursuing a more traditional American form of protest by suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging “systematic theft on a mass scale.” Japan’s Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association has also protested against AI companies “freeriding on the labour of news outlets”.