Radiohead, Jamiroquai, Nitin Sawhney join over 10,000 creatives in AI warning statement

13,500 creatives have issued a statement warning against the unlicensed use of their work via artificial intelligence (AI).

Radiohead members Thom Yorke, Ed O'Brien, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood and Philip Selway are among the signatures, which also includes musicians such as Nitin Sawhney, ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, Hot Chip's Joe Goddard, The Cure's Robert Smith, Jamiroqua's Jason Kay, AURORA, Max Richter and Billy Bragg.

Other high profile signatories include actors such as Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon, novelists such as Sir Kazuo Ishiguro and Sir Ian Rankin, among many more creatives.

Titled Statement on AI training, it reads: “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.”

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This public list of signatories follows the ongoing legal battles between creatives and the use of their work to train artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT, which some claim breaches copyright laws.

Composer, former AI executive and organiser of the open letter, Ed Newton-Rex shared with The Guardian that people who rely on making a living from their creative work are “very worried” about the current situation.

“There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two – sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third – training data – for free,” he shares.

He adds: “When AI companies call this ‘training data’, they dehumanise it. What we’re talking about is people’s work – their writing, their art, their music.”

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A study from music rights organisation APRA AMCOS earlier this year revealed that 82% of artists are “concerned” about the use of AI in music.

The Australia and New Zealand study - which has been named “the largest study of its kind” with 4,200 artists involved - found that 23% of artists' revenues could be at risk due to advances in generative AI by 2028.

Take a look at the statement and its signatures here.

Becky Buckle is Mixmag's Multimedia Editor, follow her on Twitter