Ed Sheeran
Musician
One of the world’s best-selling songwriters finds AI “a bit weird” — joking that Hollywood spent 60 years warning us — and backed the UK artists’ campaign against letting AI companies train on copyrighted music without permission.
In his words
For the last 60 years, Hollywood movies have been telling you, “Don’t do it.” And now everyone’s doing it. I’m just like, “Have you not seen the movies where they kill us all?”
If you’re taking a job away from a human being, that’s probably a bad thing. The whole point of society is we do jobs and do things, if everything is done by robots, everyone is gonna be out of work.
Biography
Ed Sheeran (born 1991) went from busking to becoming one of the most commercially successful musicians of the century — ÷ (Divide) was the world’s best-selling album of 2017, and “Shape of You” remains among Spotify’s most-streamed songs ever. He is also pop’s most prominent recent defender of songcraft in court, winning back-to-back copyright trials over “Shape of You” (2022) and “Thinking Out Loud” (2023).
“Have you not seen the movies?”
Asked about AI music in an Audacy interview in August 2023, Sheeran said he found the technology “a bit weird” and did not understand the rush to build it, invoking six decades of Hollywood cautionary tales and worrying aloud about jobs: a society where everything is done by robots, he argued, leaves everyone out of work.
He put his name where his mouth was in February 2025, signing the open letter in The Times — with Dua Lipa, Elton John and Paul McCartney — that called the UK government’s planned AI training exemption “a wholesale giveaway of rights and income from the UK creative sectors to big tech.”
There is an ironic coda: in 2025, industry chatter accused parts of his album Play of sounding AI-written — a charge that says less about Sheeran than about how quickly “sounds like AI” became pop’s newest insult.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/ed-sheeran