Annie Lennox, Kate Bush, others contribute to a silent album to combat AI offers

The release of a new album, Is that what we want?that includes silent contributions from musicians, including Kate Bush, Damon Albarne and Ani Lennox, attracts attention to proposed changes to the UK’s Copyright Act in respect of AI.

The protest album organized by a musician and AI entrepreneur Ed Newton-Rexconsists of 12 songs that include more than 47 minutes of silence recorded in empty studios and other spaces of more than 1000 associates. The titles of the songs combined say, “The British government should not legalize music theft to take advantage of AI companies.”

Album, along with a previous statement published months ago by almost 50,000 artists and artistshas been brought into line with the proposed changes in the United Kingdom, which would allow companies to train AI models for honest use, as well as copyright -protected content, unless copyright owners refuse to give a permit specifically.

The United Kingdom Government on February 25th held a public consultation on the changes in the rules they have public criticism From figures, including Andrew Lloyd Weber, Dua Lipa and Paul McCartney.

Companies like Chatgpt Maker Openai, Google, Microsoft and Apple require huge amounts of data to train their large linguistic data models. Information can include anything from digital newspaper archives to digitalized books to social media accounts.

The problem in the UK is now whether AI models can be trained not only for publicly available data and academic research, but also for copyright music and lyrics (such as lyrics). According to the changes that are proposed, companies and persons holding copyright for songs or other elements will have to refuse to prevent companies from training AI with their works.

Read more: Beatles’ new video: How AI helps and hinders the music industry

Alina TrapovaA British legal scientist and teacher who closely follows the debate says the proposed changes “go beyond music”, but the music industry is well organized to draw attention to the question.

The function of refusing the proposal, said Trapova, “can lead to the leaving the right holders without control over their work. This is because the refusal mechanisms that exist these days can be and surround themselves.” Artists may not know that they have to give up. Trapova said that a refusal mechanism was proposed, which would require right holders to give explicit authorization.

“Whatever the government continues, it must follow some standardized process that ideally will coincide with what other major jurisdictions do on this front,” she said, adding that the EU had passed the EU similar measures As part of last year’s AI law, but is in the process of improving the way cases are processed to improve transparency and reservations of rights.

“The debate on the efficiency and weight of the refusal models continues,” says Chris Mamen, a partner at Womble Bond Dickinson, who specializes in Tech and Ai Law. “On the issue of confidentiality and protection of consumer data, the US is widely described as the next model of refusal, while Europe, with GDPR, follows a refusal model.”

For this set of changes specifically, “The fear of musicians and other content creators is that AI models trained for their work will be able to generate free or cheap new works in an industrial/supercomputer scale that will get them out of income for Earn income from their content creation activities, “Mamen said.

“There may still be some fuses imposed by AI platforms, for example, by prohibiting prompts that want a way out” in the style of a “particular living artist. But one can easily, he added.