Artificial intelligence is making deeper inroads into the music world. Platforms are now experimenting with automatically generated tracks—no human artist, no human-written lyrics, no real instruments. It’s the perfect deal for business: zero royalties, zero fees, just endless music produced at near-zero cost. But real musicians haven’t stood idly by.
1,000 artists, including Kate Bush, The Clash, and Cat Stevens, have released an album of pure silence titled “Is This What We Want?” Each track’s name is a single word, and together they form the sentence: “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies.” Because if music is reduced to mere algorithms and numbers, these artists have chosen not to play at all.
It’s a powerful statement highlighting a major issue. Music isn’t just sound—it’s emotion, an experience, an act of human creativity. Yet as AI expands unchecked, it risks becoming a soulless, industrial product. When platforms start favoring machine-generated tracks, human creativity is sidelined. And this isn’t just a music issue.
That’s exactly why I wrote Cyberhumanism. This isn’t just a technological revolution; it’s a cultural challenge. We must decide whether to let AI replace our creativity or use it to elevate it—without losing what makes us human. And this album of silence sends a clear message: without people, without their art and their soul, technology alone is nothing.
