This new protest album against AI is hard to listen to because it’s completely silent
Artists are rightly concerned about how much AI music slop is out there, much of it trained illegally on material written (and owned!) by real human beings. I’ll repeat it: AI should be used to do the stuff we don’t want to do, so we have more time to create art. Is anyone clamouring for computer programs to provide us with something as precious as music?
There’s a backlash to all this, the latest being an album called Is This What We Want?, which features Paul McCartney’s first new song in five years. I’ve embedded below, but it’s not going to be all that riveting. It’s two minutes and forty-five seconds of almost dead silence.
The album includes nearly dead-silent tracks from dozens and dozens of artists, including Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Pigs x 7, Robert Fripp, Sam Fender, Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran, The Clash(?!?), Billy Ocean, composer Hans Zimmer, Imogen Heap, Yazz, Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Jamiroquai, and Marillion. They seek to make the point that without human creators, there is no music.
The album will be out later this month.
