Paul McCartney to UK Government: Don’t Let AI ‘Rip Off’ Artists

Paul McCartney implored the British government to protect artists as it considers a copyright law update that the former Beatle believes would make it easier to “rip off” creators.

The U.K. government is currently consulting on proposals that would allow tech companies to use copyrighted material to train AI via text and data mining unless the rights holders opt out.

In a recent BBC interview, McCartney worried that these updates could discourage artists from creating new works and result in a “loss of creativity.” He contrasted this from the days of his youth, saying: “When we were kids in Liverpool, we found a job that we loved, but it also paid the bills.”

“You get young guys, girls, coming up, and they write a beautiful song, and they don’t own it, and they don’t have anything to do with it. And anyone who wants can just rip it off,” McCartney added.

“The truth is, the money’s going somewhere. And it gets on the streaming platforms. Somebody’s getting it, and it should be the person who created it. It shouldn’t just be some tech giant somewhere. Somebody’s getting paid, so why shouldn’t it be the guy who sat down and wrote ‘Yesterday’?”

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Although the proposed copyright law update would stipulate a “rights reservation” allowing creators to opt out of having their work used to train AI, critics of the plan say it’s not feasible for creators to individually notify these AI companies or to monitor what happens to their work. An alternate proposal, in which artists could opt in to allowing their work to be used to train AI, will be put forward this week.

McCartney was firm in his message to the government as it considers these options. “We’re the people, you’re the government! You’re supposed to protect us. That’s your job,” he said. “So you know, if you’re putting through a bill, make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not gonna have them.”

But … Didn’t the Beatles Use AI?

McCartney is no stranger to AI himself. He and Ringo Starr used the technology to complete the final Beatles song, 2023’s “Now and Then,” extracting John Lennon‘s vocal from his original piano demo and cleaning it up with the “de-mixing” technology previously used in Peter Jackson‘s 2021 Get Back docuseries.

But there’s a big between Jackson’s machine-learning-assisted audio restoration — which analyzes data to produce predictions and relevant outcomes — and generative AI, which creates entirely new content based off of that data. In other words, there’s no “fake Lennon” on “Now and Then” — just a cleaned-up version of his actual voice.

The “fake Lennon” scenario is exactly what McCartney hopes the government will prohibit. “If there’s such a thing as a government, it’s their responsibility, I would think, to protect the young people,” he told the BBC. “To try and enhance the whole thing so that it works, so that these people have got jobs and can enhance the world with their wonderful art.”

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