June 01, 2025
Thom Yorke of Radiohead just claimed AI (Artificial Intelligence) does nothing more than “steal” original work.
The 56-year-old songwriter, who recently released his first full-length and collaborative electronic album with Mark Pritchard, Tall Tales, is against AI being integrated in the music industry.
Speaking to Electronic Sound magazine, the Creep talent said, “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.”
“Is Al capable of genuine original creative thought? I have yet to see that,” Thom seemingly challenged.
The Dawn Chorus hitmaker continued, “It analyses and steals and builds iterations without acknowledging the original human work it analyzed. 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.”
"But the economic structure is morally wrong... the human work used by AI to fake its creativity is not being acknowledged,” Thom emphasized.
He further explained, “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.”
“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,” Thom Yorke of Radiohead concluded.