Kate Bush has called on ministers to protect artists from AI using their copyrighted works amid growing concerns from high-profile creatives and ongoing political uncertainty over how to handle the issue.
The reclusive singer-songwriter has joined the actors Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, Rosario Dawson, Stephen Fry and Hugh Bonneville in signing a petition, now backed by over 36,000 creatives, which states 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”.
Her intervention emerged after Sir Paul McCartney became the latest star to back calls for laws to stop mass copyright theft by generative AI companies, warning the technology “could just take over”.
Bush, who shot to fame with Wuthering Heights in 1978 but whose last album was released in 2011, gave a rare interview this year in which she said she was “very keen” to make a new album, saying: “I’ve got lots of ideas … it’s been a long time.”
The 66-year-old told the BBC: “I’m really looking forward to getting back into that creative space … Particularly [in] the last year, I’ve felt really ready to start doing something new.”
Amid growing hunger from tech companies for content on which to train their artificial intelligence algorithms, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, was expected to launch a consultation last month on a system that would require copyright holders to opt out of having their work mined to train AI algorithms. Kyle believes AI could be an engine of growth in the UK economy.
Ministers were this week unable to say whether it would be launched before Christmas.
Tech UK, an industry lobby group, has called for a “more open” market to enable firms to use copyrighted data and make payments. It wants a legally enforceable opt-out system giving its members freedom to scrape data from copyright holders that do not actively refuse.
AI companies would then strike deals with copyright holders where their data was clearly referenced at the points their model creates a finished product – for example an AI-derived text report or video.
But this approach has been strongly opposed by creatives, who say it is too complicated to opt out and warn that copies of works that exist elsewhere online would not be covered. They want opt-in arrangements that would allow them to be paid to allow algorithms to be trained on their works.
Thom Yorke, the lead singer of the bands Radiohead and The Smile, and Björn Ulvaeus of Abba, have also signed the same petition as Bush. Ulvaeus has said: “I don’t know if it’s too late but certainly we have to fight for the writers of … music so they can be remunerated in some form or other.”
Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI company executive who quit over concerns about the industry’s handling of copyright, on Wednesday told MPs investigating the issue: “Creators are organising, there is a large and growing backlash to the wide scale, intellectual property theft, that is happening in the generative AI industry.”
Newton-Rex, who arranged the petition, added: “I think generative AI can be a powerful tool for creativity, but sadly, right now, as is commonly known, the majority of gen AI companies are unfairly exploiting the life’s work of the world’s creators. They’re using that to train models that compete with those creators …
“Changing the law to allow training on copyrighted work without a licence … would, I think, be totally unacceptable to Britain’s incredibly important and rightly respected creators.”
On Tuesday, Lisa Nandy, the UK culture secretary, also voiced concerns about the way an opt-out system would work, although it is understood that a version of that system remains the government’s preferred approach.
She said: “We have looked at the limitations of similar legislation in the USA and the EU, so we have reservations about this idea that you can simply just say I want to opt out and then find that you have been completely erased from the internet.”
Publishers have complained that any decision to opt out of allowing Google to scrape their content for its AI services means they become invisible in searches.
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