Not OK, Computer: Thom Yorke & Radiohead Join Artists Blasting AI

Tom Yorke photographed by Steve Tanner, courtesy of XL Recordings

A group of writers, musicians and artists have issued a joint statement outlining their concerns over the fast-developing artificial intelligence revolution. All of Radiohead alongside Yorke joined the likes of Geoff Barrow, Billy Brag, Robert Smith, Max Richter, Jim Kerr, Joe Goddard of Hot Chip in the letter which criticised companies that use their work to feed AI. “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,” the statement reads. 11,500 people have now signed the document, which can be viewed here.

According to The Guardian, letter organiser and former AI tech type said “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.” The poacher-turned-gamekeeper also said that “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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