Hozier
Musician
The Irish singer-songwriter behind “Take Me to Church” told BBC Newsnight in 2023 he would “absolutely” join a musicians’ strike over AI — and questioned whether machine output, created without human experience, meets the definition of art.
In his words
It can’t create something based on a human experience. So I don’t know if it meets the definition of art.
Can I imagine? Yeah. Joining in solidarity if there was action on that? Absolutely.
Biography
Hozier — Andrew Hozier-Byrne, born 1990 in County Wicklow, Ireland — broke through in 2013 with “Take Me to Church,” a gospel-blues protest song that became a global phenomenon. His literate, politically engaged catalogue — most recently the Dante-inspired Unreal Unearth (2023), which yielded the US number-one single “Too Sweet” — has made him one of folk-rock’s most trusted moral voices.
A strike-ready skeptic
Speaking to Victoria Derbyshire on BBC Newsnight in August 2023, as Hollywood’s actors and writers struck partly over AI, Hozier said the technology posed a comparable threat to music. Asked whether he could imagine musicians taking similar action — and whether he would join — he answered without hedging: “Absolutely.”
His deeper objection was philosophical. Whether AI output is art, he said, “is nearly a philosophical debate” — but because a model cannot create from lived human experience, he doubted it qualifies. He has since kept up the theme, criticizing tech companies for training on artists’ catalogues without consent or compensation.
No musicians’ strike materialized, but Hozier’s comments were among the first from a major artist to frame AI as a labor issue for music rather than merely a copyright one, prefiguring the union-style campaigns that followed in the UK and US.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/hozier