Thom Yorke calls the economics of AI morally wrong

Thom Yorke says the economics of generative AI are morally wrong, because the human work it is built from goes unacknowledged and the people who wrote it go unpaid. He was talking to Electronic Sound around the release of Tall Tales, his album with Mark Pritchard, which came out on Warp on 9 May. Last October he was among the signatories of the Statement on AI training, the composer Ed Newton-Rex's one-sentence letter against using creative work to train AI without a licence.

Is AI capable of genuine original creative thought? I have yet to see that.

Thom Yorke¹

In music, art and the creative industries, Yorke says, AI has so far managed only variations on what people have made, and obvious ones. It analyses human work, takes from it and builds iterations on it without crediting the original. 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.¹

He sees a tech-bro nightmare ahead. Devaluing the rest of humanity is what the tech industry does best, he says, and in the US it is now spilling over into politics. 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.¹