Their Album Is Wordless. Will Their Protest Against A.I. Resound?

Europe|Their Album Is Wordless. Will Their Protest Against A.I. Resound?

Sometimes, silence speaks louder than song.

That’s the hope, at least, for more than 1,000 musicians who released a lyric-less album on Tuesday to protest the British government’s proposal to expand the ways that developers can use copyright-protected works to train artificial intelligence models.

The album, which was created by artists including Annie Lennox, Billy Ocean, Hans Zimmer and Kate Bush, is not exactly silent: It features recordings of empty studios, which the artists say represent “the impact we expect the government’s proposals would have on musicians’ livelihoods.”

There are footsteps and rustles — is that a door closing? a page turning? a fly? — but only the most out-there contemporary composers would refer to the sounds as songs.

“Doesn’t that silence say it all?” Kate Bush, who contributed to the album, said in a statement, adding, “If these changes go ahead, the life’s work of all the country’s musicians will be handed over to A.I. companies for free.”

Under the government’s proposals, artists would have to opt out, or “reserve their rights,” to keep their works from being used to train A.I. The window for public comments on the proposal, which is part of a broader government consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence, was set to close Tuesday night.

“Opt-out shifts the burden of controlling your works onto the rights holder,” said Ed Newton-Rex, who organized the album and is the chief executive of Fairly Trained, a nonprofit that certifies generative A.I. companies for the training data they use.