Thom Yorke of Radiohead recently asserted that Artificial Intelligence (AI) primarily “steals” original work. The 56-year-old songwriter, who just released his first full-length collaborative electronic album, Tall Tales, with Mark Pritchard, is firmly against the integration of AI within the music industry.
In an interview with Electronic Sound magazine, the artist known for “Creep” stated, “As far as I can tell in music and art and all creative industries, AI is so far only able to ‘create’ variations on genuine human artistic expression, and those are obvious.” Thom seemingly challenged, “Is AI capable of genuine original creative thought? I have yet to see that.”
The hitmaker behind “Dawn Chorus” continued, “It analyzes and steals and builds iterations without acknowledging the original human work it analyzed. It creates pallid facsimiles, which is useful in the same way auto-accompaniment is useful, or a screensaver of a beautiful natural landscape in a billionaire’s bunker is.” Thom emphasized, “But the economic structure is morally wrong… the human work used by AI to fake its creativity is not being acknowledged.”
He further elaborated, “Writers are not paid. It’s a weird kind of wanky, tech-bro nightmare future, and it seems this is what the tech industry does best. A devaluing of the rest of humanity, other than themselves, hidden behind tech. In the US right now, we are witnessing this spilling over into politics.” Thom Yorke of Radiohead concluded, “We are, in modern parlance, ‘creatives,’ which is a term I find deeply offensive because it arrived around the time that art morphed into ‘content’ for devices.”
