There has been a lot of noise about a new anti-AI protest album over the past week. Ironic, considering that the LP comprises 47 minutes and 17 seconds of silence (bar some sonic fuzz and background hums). It features a dozen recordings of empty music studios across the UK: a soundless vision of a dystopian future.
Is This What We Want? was made in response to the government’s proposal to amend current copyright laws, which would make it even easier for AI models to scrape musical data from the internet. Already, services like Open AI’s Jukebox have “listened to” endless hours of music for free, covered by fair use exemptions and generated uncannily similar versions like a fine-tuned covers band. The suggested policy risks artists being ripped off, even eventually becoming totally redundant. “In the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?” Kate Bush asks in the album’s press release.
Bush is part of the group of musicians behind the stunt – called, rather matter-of-factly, “1,000 UK Artists” and put together by the British composer Ed Newton-Rex. The group also includes Damon Albarn, Sam Fender, Annie Lennox and, to help with numbers, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (I assume they counted all 80 musicians). I can’t see Brian Eno on the list; I assume even he thought it was too ambient. Producer Beni Giles must have relished mastering nothingness: who needs Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound when you can have a Wall of Silence?
The album track list is an acrostic, spelling out the not particularly catchy slogan: “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies.” The sentiment is a good one. Art is being churned into chicken feed for insatiably hungry, content-farmed AI models. Aside from the fact that this leaves creatives worse off, it also serves audiences regurgitated ultra-processed gruel. The answer suggested by the question Is This What We Want? is obviously a resounding no; and the music industry is right to use its platform to critique the artificial intelligentsia.
But is the solution the album poses – 12 tracks of silence – what we want instead? It isn’t original. In 1952 John Cage infamously released “4:33” – four minutes and 33 seconds containing no sound. And yet he also made it a piece of performance art, inviting an orchestra to play it live, an original stunt at the time. Still, far from showing off the irreplicable capabilities of human creativity, it is as scrapable and mimicable as can be. Take that, robots!
So what’s so confronting about it? Various idioms teach us that silence is precious (“silence is golden”); strong (“a wall of silence”); and mysterious (“a conspiracy of silence”). We’re taught that sometimes, staying silent is stronger than speaking. All of this has made it a potent political tool in the past. As an act of civil disobedience, it can demonstrate non-compliance without resorting to either violence or volume. In 1917, the New York Silent Parade saw 10,000 Black Americans march in silence to protest lynchings in Waco and Memphis, a poignant display of solidarity in the face of subjugation; decades later, Tommie Smith and John Carlos defiantly held the Black Power salute aloft at the 1968 Olympics. More recently, climate activists have staged taped-mouth demonstrations at summits and silent study-ins were held in universities across America to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Most of us still struggle to engage with silence in a meaningful way; mainly because we can’t shut up. Commemorative silences have the power to be impactful, but they’re rarely observed anymore; it’s why in football, they had to be changed to a minute’s applause in reaction to misbehaving crowds. Silence doesn’t cut through our exceptionally noisy world anymore, because it’s almost instantly broken by background sound, immediately shattering its impact. When it’s deployed, it falls on deaf ears.
Marina Abramovic’s performance at Glastonbury last year, for example, saw the notorious provocateur invite the crowd to stay silent for seven minutes to confront violence; but sound bleeding out from other stages (and cracked cans of beer) rendered it inert. Across the festival at the Park Stage, performance artist BISHI was reciting Yoko Ono’s “Voice Piece for Soprano” – encouraging festival-goers to scream at the top of their lungs. This is what we should be doing; shouting louder, fighting noise with noise and creating something worth listening to. If Is This What We Want? is meant to be commemorative, why are we holding a vigil for music rather than blasting it back at the bots?
It doesn’t help that the album is hosted on Spotify, which has been investing in AI for a decade and recently cut staff as a result. As Popbitch noted this week, several Sony execs feature on the list of 1,000 UK Artists; even though the label was also involved in the release of e.motion’s recent viral AI dance track “Somebody Else”.
While the record’s streaming profits will go to the charity Help Musicians, it might have made more sense to encourage us to donate, rather than to listen to something literally unlistenable to raise funds. At the time of writing, the LP’s most-streamed song – “The” – has been played just 15,028 times on Spotify, which equates to £25.39 revenue according to Spotify Calculator. Not the greatest sponsored silence, it must be said.
The album has got people talking thanks to the prominence of the artists involved, rather than any shock factor the silence itself induces. Maybe, instead, we need an anti-AI anthem; one that rages against the machines. This silent treatment doesn’t prove the inimitable quality of human genius or even the limitations of AI models – it just hands the mic to the bots instead.
[See more: The politics beneath Zelensky’s suit]
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