Radiohead’s lead singer Thom Yorke has recently spoken about how he thinks artificial intelligence does nothing other than “steal” original work from human artistic work. Yorke, who recently release his first fully electronic album ‘Tall Tales’, a collaboration album with fellow musician Mark Pritchard, made it known that he was against the rise of AI in the music industry as well as other creative industries. The singer insists that the technology is stealing from musicians’ ideas with no financial compensation.
In a conversation with Electronic Sound magazine, Thom said: “As far as I can tell in music and art and all creative industries, Al is so far only able to ‘create’ variations on genuine human artistic expression, and those are obvious. Is Al capable of genuine original creative thought? I have yet to see that. It analyses and steals and builds iterations without acknowledging the original human work it analysed. It creates pallid facsimiles, which is useful in the same way auto-accompaniment is useful, or a screensaver of a beautiful natural landscape in a billionaire’s bunker is.”
“But the economic structure is morally wrong… the human work used by AI to fake its creativity is not being acknowledged. Writers are not paid. It’s a weird kind of wanky, tech-bro nightmare future, and it seems this is what the tech industry does best. A devaluing of the rest of humanity, other than themselves, hidden behind tech. In the US right now, we are witnessing this spilling over into politics. We are, in modern parlance, creatives, which is a term I find deeply offensive because it arrived around the time that art morphed into ‘content’ for devices.”
The singer, who has always been very outspoken, was one of the many artists to sign the petition against AI amongst names such as ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Kate Bush, Blur’s Damon Albarn and more. The petition read: “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.”
Yorke recently issued a statement regarding his stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict. You can find our MXDWN coverage on that here.
