All five members of Radiohead sign the statement against AI training

Thom Yorke, Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway are among the first signatories of a statement against training generative AI on creative work without a licence, published at aitrainingstatement.org on Tuesday 22 October. All five are on its list of names on the first day, a rare stand by the whole band in a year when Radiohead have been quiet.

More than 10,000 people signed that day. The musicians include Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA, Robert Smith of the Cure, the composer Max Richter, Billy Bragg and Geoff Barrow, and the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro and the actor Julianne Moore signed too. So did the American actors' union SAG-AFTRA, the American Federation of Musicians and Universal Music Group.

The statement is the work of Ed Newton-Rex, a British composer who resigned as head of audio at Stability AI in 2023 because the company held that training on copyrighted work without a licence was fair use. He has since set up Fairly Trained, a non-profit that certifies AI firms which train on licensed material. AI companies, he says, will spend up to a billion dollars on engineers and computing for one model and still expect the data for free.

The UK government is preparing a consultation on letting AI firms train on published work unless the rights holders opt out, The Guardian reports. Newton-Rex says an opt-out puts the burden on the creator, and most people never hear of such schemes. When AI companies call this ‘training data’, they dehumanise it. What we’re talking about is people’s work – their writing, their art, their music.¹