I noticed something the other day that captured my notice. It was a headline and the headline read something like: ‘Annie Lennox Releases Silent Album’. Pardon? Since I’m a fan of record albums that have music on them, this headline gave me pause. After pausing for a while, it almost gave me a headache.
Because my head wondered (as perhaps yours does too) why on earth would an awesome musician like Annie Lennox put out a recording of absolutely nothing, and then, by the way, charge for it?! (Although, it might be a bit hit with people who hate rock music?)
So, of course, I had to engage in exhaustive research by clicking on the interweb for a couple of minutes, and I found out that there’s a lot more to it than just a Scottish songstress being weird. In fact, the new album is called Is This What We Want? and it features a “stellar list of more than 1,000 musicians”! And if you’re wondering how anyone managed to squeeze 1,000 musical artists – and some of the biggest names in the industry - on one record album that has no music, well, you’re not alone.
So the musicians, including Sir Paul Beatle and Sir Elton Watercloset and Sir A.L. Webber and many, many other Hit Parade heavy hitters, have lent their names to the album, which has 12 tracks, each one featuring the sound of an empty recording studio or performance space.
It is meant to show what might happen if the government allows AI to keep purloining the artists’ original creative copyrighted work. And, cleverly, each of the tracks is titled with a word that forms this sentence: “The British Government Must Not Legalize Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies”.
it’s a protest of course, and it’s a good one because it centers around the incredible rise of one of the most controversial and potentially dangerous developments in history. And, no, I’m not talking about the orange-faced fuzzhead fascist to our south; I’m referring to the rapid rise of the anti-reality technology called “AI”.
And the British musicians that are protesting with the silent album want to make sure the ‘AI’ doesn’t stand for “All In”.
If I understand it correctly, which of course I don’t, companies creating Artificial Intelligence use powerful computer programs to gather every lyric, written and spoken word, every musical note and every single bit of information from the interweb, like some sort of cyber turbo Dyson.
Thing is, AI companies then use that “knowledge” to instantly answer your questions, create essays or make stories or lyrics or music or just about anything. In other words, a computer ‘creates’ it for you, and usually, better than you can. AI companies call it “text or data mining”; creative artists and others call it “stealing”. I call it “exploding my brain”.
I tried that ChatGPT which I just found out is short for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer” and which is described as “technology to generate human-like conversational dialogue”. It scared the fiddlesticks out of me. (More on that next week.)
All proceeds from the sale of the silent album go to a charity called Help Musicians and towards stopping the British government (which is an oxymoron) from changing copyright laws to favour AI. I hope the record does very well, but I’m not sure it’ll be as big a hit as the one that comes immediately to mind, and that was certainly the best silence any of us had ever heard on a record album. Remember “Sounds of Silence” by Paul and Art?
Harley Hay is a Red Deer author and filmmaker. Reach out to Harley with any thoughts or ideas at harleyhay99@gmail.com.
