A silent album was released this week in 2025.
Here's Sir Paul McCartney explaining why he is against AI being used in this way. Of course, he used AI himself - or did he? Read this.
In 2023, Sir Paul and Beatles drummer Sir Ringo Starr used AI to extract the vocals from an unfinished demo left by John Lennon to produce a new song, Now and Then. The song, billed as the Beatles' final release, drew widespread praise and was nominated for two Grammys and a Brit award."I think AI is great, and it can do lots of great things," Sir Paul said. "We took an old cassette of John's and cleaned his voice up so it sounded like it had just been recorded yesterday. So it has its uses. But it shouldn't rip creative people off. There's no sense in that."
The album project called 'Make it Fair' was a protest about the use of copyrighted music to train AI models, which could then produce music which copied their style. Music generates billions of pounds to the UK's economy, and is also part of the UK's 'soft power'.
This was the 'track listing' on the back of the album...
The message is clear to Goverment, who have done *checks notes - nothing about it.
Generative AI can produce 'music' but it's not really music. Nick Cave has spoken about this elsewhere.
Sting warned about them back in 2023.
The campaign website is here, where you can find out about the artists who contributed to the project.
And don't forget that John Cage got there first with the silent piece of music back in 1952.
And here's William Marx performing the piece:
