Gladstone A.I. co-founders and CEOs Edouard Harris and Jeremie Harris explain the major role that A.I will play in national security and warfare on'The Will Cain Show.' A new album called "Is This What We Want?" features a stellar list of more than 1,000 musicians -- and the sound of silence. With contributions from British artists including Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Cat Stevens and Damon Albarn, the album was released Tuesday to protest proposed British changes to artificial intelligence laws that artists fear will erode their creative control. Critics of the idea fear that it will make it harder for artists to retain control of their work and will undermine Britain's creative industries. Elton John and Paul McCartney are among those who have spoken out against the plan.

The proposed changes are seeking to resolve a standoff between AI firms and creatives. Sir Paul McCartney has warned the technology "could just take over" without new laws. However, it will also allow writers, artists and composers to "reserve their rights", which involves declaring that they do not want their work to be used in an AI training process – or to demand a licence fee to do so. "We're absolutely clear that this is about giving greater control in a difficult and complex set of circumstances to creators and rights holders, and we intend it to lead to more licensing of content, which is potentially a new revenue stream for creators," he said. The British composer Ed Newton-Rex, a key figure in the campaign by creative professionals for a fair deal, told the Guardian in October that opt-out schemes were "totally unfair" for creators.

Abba's Björn Ulvaeus, the actor Julianne Moore, the Radiohead singer Thom Yorke are among 10,500 signatories of a statement from the creative industries warning artificial intelligence companies that unlicensed use of their work is a "major, unjust threat" to artists' livelihoods. "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," reads the statement. Thousands of creative professionals from the worlds of literature, music, film, theatre and television have given their backing to the statement, with authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Ann Patchett, and Kate Mosse, musicians including the Cure's Robert Smith as well as the composer Max Richter and actors including Kevin Bacon, Rosario Dawson and F Murray Abraham. The organiser of the letter, the British composer and former AI executive Ed Newton-Rex, said people who make a living from creative work are "very worried" about the situation. "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," he said.

In his interesting opinion article (Robots sacked, screenings shut down: a new movement of luddites is rising up against AI, 27 July), Ed Newton-Rex misses one of the most serious concerns about artificial intelligence: its surveillance potential. Governments have always spied on their subjects/citizens: technology multiplies their powers of spying. In his novel 1984, George Orwell had the authorities install a two-way telescreen system in every party member's home, and in all workplaces and public spaces. This allowed Big Brother to monitor individuals' actions and conversations, while he himself remained invisible. Today's digital control systems operating through electronic tracking devices and voice and facial recognition systems are simply Big Brother's control devices brought up to date.

The music industry has officially declared war on Suno and Udio, two of the most prominent AI music generators. The plaintiffs seek damages up to 150,000 per work infringed. The lawsuit against Suno is filed in Massachusetts, while the case against Udio's parent company Uncharted Inc. was filed in New York. Suno and Udio did not immediately respond to a request to comment. "Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it's'fair' to copy an artist's life's work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all," Recording Industry Association of America chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a press release.

OpenAI is fighting lawsuits from artists, writers, and publishers who allege it inappropriately used their work to train the algorithms behind ChatGPT and other AI systems. On Tuesday the company announced a tool apparently designed to appease creatives and rights holders, by granting them some control over how OpenAI uses their work. The company says it will launch a tool in 2025 called Media Manager that allows content creators to opt out their work from the company's AI development. In a blog post, OpenAI described the tool as a way to allow "creators and content owners to tell us what they own" and specify "how they want their works to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training." OpenAI said that it is working with "creators, content owners, and regulators" to develop the tool and intends it to "set an industry standard."

Stability AI, the makers of the popular AI image generation model Stable Diffusion, had trained the model by feeding it with millions of images that had been "scraped" from the internet, without the consent of their creators. Newton-Rex, the head of Stability's audio team, disagreed. "Companies worth billions of dollars are, without permission, training generative AI models on creators' works, which are then being used to create new content that in many cases can compete with the original works. In December, the New York Times sued OpenAI in a Manhattan court, alleging that the creator of ChatGPT had illegally used millions of the newspaper's articles to train AI systems that are intended to compete with the Times as a reliable source of information. Meanwhile, in July 2023, comedian Sarah Silverman and other writers sued OpenAI and Meta, accusing the companies of using their writing to train AI models without their permission.

Ed Newton-Rex says generative AI has an ethics problem. He ought to know, because he used to be part of the fast-growing industry. Newton-Rex was TikTok's head AI designer and then an executive at Stability AI until he quit in disgust in November over the company's stance on collecting training data. After his high-profile departure, Newton-Rex threw himself into conversation after conversation about what building AI ethically would look like in practice. "It struck me that there are a lot of people who want to use generative AI models that treat creators fairly," he says.

He joins the likes of artists such as Bad Bunny, who recently spoke out against a viral TikTok song that used AI to mimic his voice. In his public resignation letter, Newton-Rex explains that he believes Stability AI has a more "nuanced view" than some of its competitors. Newton-Rex is a published classical composer and founded Jukedeck, which created music using AI, in 2012. He became the product director of TikTok's in-house AI lab after the company purchased Jukedeck in 2019 and subsequently worked at Voicey (acquired by Snap) before joining Stability AI in November 2022. Ironically, there's also been an (as yet unsuccessful) push to protect AI-produced work.

YouTube has teamed up with music artists including John Legend and Sia to offer AI-generated versions of their singing voices as soundtracks for creator videos. The Google-owned video platform is using a music generation model created by the search company's AI unit to produce the unique 30-second clips in a limited trial. The nine artists are: Alec Benjamin, Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, John Legend, Sia, T-Pain, Troye Sivan and Papoose. YouTube said the experiment, called Dream Track, has been opened to a small group of US creators using its Shorts feature – the platform's answer to TikTok. In a blogpost, YouTube said creators would be able to produce a 30-second soundtrack by typing a text prompt.