Is This What We Want? is an album by various artists released on 25 February 2025 through Virgin Music Group. It consists of ambient noise recorded in recording studios, protesting the use of unlicensed copyrighted work to train artificial intelligence. The track titles form the sentence "The British Government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies". Profits from the album go toward the UK charity Help Musicians.[1]
Rapid progress in AI technology, constituting an AI boom, was brought to public attention in the early 2020s by text-to-image models such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, which were able to generate complex images that convincingly resembled human-made artworks.[2] The proliferation of such image generation algorithms coincided with the release of GPT-3 and development of GPT-4, advanced large language models which produce highly convincing text.[3][4] These transformer-based models designed to create new content from prompts are collectively called generative artificial intelligence, and they require vast sets of training data. This data often consists of text, images, and other media scraped from the web, prompting concerns that the AI products may violate intellectual property rights.[5]
Suno AI and Udio, two AI startups whose products generate music recordings following user-submitted prompts, were sued in 2024 by Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group, who alleged that the companies used copyrighted recordings in their training data without authorization.[6]
In December 2024, the UK government announced a consultation on copyright and AI, outlining a preferred approach that would see the introduction of a data mining copyright exception with a rights reservation package for rights holders.[7] In the months following the announcement of the consultation, a number of prominent musicians warned of the threat it posed to musicians, including Paul McCartney and Elton John.[8]
Content
The standard version of Is This What We Want? consists of 12 tracks, each uncredited.[1] The tracks consist of ambient noise recorded in recording studios.[1] The track titles form the sentence "The British Government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies".[1][9] The album suggests that original music will be silenced if AI companies exploit musicians' intellectual property.[10] It was organised by the British composer Ed Newton-Rex, who had previously worked at Stable Diffusion's parent company, Stability AI.[1][11]
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