“It’s a weird kind of wanky, tech-bro nightmare future”: Radiohead’s Thom Yorke says AI does nothing more than “steal” from human artistsRadiohead frontman Thom Yorke is the latest artist to speak out against the rise of AI in the music industry, slamming its lack of “genuine original creative thought” and the way it “steals” from human artists without proper credit.
In a recent chat with Electronic Sound magazine, Yorke offers a scathing critique of Artificial Intelligence’s creative limits – and the exploitative systems behind it.
“As far as I can tell in music and art and all creative industries, Al is so far only able to ‘create’ variations on genuine human artistic expression, and those are obvious,” says Yorke. “Is Al capable of genuine original creative thought? I have yet to see that.”

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He adds that AI “analyses and steals and builds iterations without acknowledging the original human work it analysed”: 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.”
The musician also condemns the wider tech industry and its apparent disregard for human labour and authorship, saying, “The economic structure is morally wrong… the human work used by AI to fake its creativity is not being acknowledged. Writers are not paid.”
“It’s a weird kind of wanky, tech-bro nightmare future, and it seems this is what the tech industry does best. A devaluing of the rest of humanity, other than themselves, hidden behind tech. In the US right now, we are witnessing this spilling over into politics.”
As Yorke explains, AI’s rise is only the latest step in a long trend of reducing art to mere “content.”
“We are, in modern parlance, ‘creatives,’” he says. “Which is a term I find deeply offensive because it arrived around the time that art morphed into ‘content’ for devices.”
The Radiohead singer is also among 10,500 signatories (which also included The Cure’s Robert Smith and ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus) of an open letter from the creative industries protesting the unlicensed use of their work by AI companies.
“The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted,” the statement read.
AI’s rapid advancement and the ethics surrounding how it’s trained has become the subject of fierce debate in recent months. Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and ex-Meta head of global affairs, recently argued that requiring companies to seek artists’ express permission before using their work to train AI models would “basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”
Sir Elton John, meanwhile, has branded the UK government as “absolute losers” over its plans to allow AI companies to train their models using copyrighted content.
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