Robbie Williams
Pop Singer
The record-setting BRIT Award winner uses AI daily and expects it to remake music the way streaming did — yet he signed the 400-artist letter demanding the UK government force AI firms to disclose the copyrighted work they train on. Pro-tool, anti-theft.
In his words
We are wealth creators, we reflect and promote the national stories, we are the innovators of the future, and AI needs us as much as it needs energy and computer skills.
I write the thing first, and then I throw the thing into AI… The things I’m writing on Instagram, I can’t spell, my grammar’s terrible. They sort that out.
Biography
Robbie Williams (born 1974 in Stoke-on-Trent) left boy band Take That in 1995 and became the defining British pop solo act of his generation — “Angels,” “Let Me Entertain You,” “Rock DJ” — collecting a record haul of BRIT Awards along the way. His life story reached cinemas in 2024 as the biopic Better Man, in which he was portrayed, fittingly for this archive, by a CGI chimpanzee.
Signing the letter, using the tools
In May 2025, Williams joined more than 400 artists — Elton John, Paul McCartney, Dua Lipa, Kate Bush — in signing an open letter urging Prime Minister Keir Starmer to back Baroness Kidron’s amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill, which would force AI developers to disclose the copyrighted works used to train their models. The letter, quoted here as letter text, called creative copyright “the lifeblood of the creative industries.”
Williams is no purist about the technology itself. In an April 2026 CNBC interview he described feeding his writing into AI to clean up spelling and grammar for Instagram — “I’ve thrown so much stuff at it now… it knows me back to front” — and has said AI will change the music industry the way streaming did. Meanwhile his longtime songwriting partner Guy Chambers has called AI’s acceleration in music “terrifying” for its potential to replace songwriters.
The combination — signing a transparency demand while personally using the tools — makes Williams a good barometer of where much of pop music actually sits: not against AI, but against being ingested into it without consent or payment.
Where they stand in the war
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/robbie-williams