Thom Yorke
Musician, Radiohead Frontman
Radiohead’s frontman — rock’s great technology pessimist — signed the 11,500-strong Statement on AI Training and calls the generative-AI economy “a weird kind of wanky, tech-bro nightmare future” built on unacknowledged human work.
In his words
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.
Is AI capable of genuine original creative thought? I have yet to see that.
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.
Biography
Thom Yorke (born 1968 in Wellingborough, England) has spent three decades as Radiohead’s frontman making machine anxiety into art — “OK Computer” and “Kid A” are the canonical soundtracks of technological alienation, built, with no small irony, on synthesizers, samplers, and even a computerized voice reciting “Fitter Happier.” His solo and Smile projects continue the same restless electronic experimentation.
From dystopian art to actual protest
In October 2024, Yorke was among the most prominent of more than 10,500 initial signatories — with Robert Smith and ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus — of the Statement on AI Training organized by composer Ed Newton-Rex, a single sentence declaring unlicensed training on creative works “a major, unjust threat” to creators’ livelihoods.
As far as I can tell in music and art and all creative industries, AI is so far only able to “create” variations on genuine human artistic expression.
In a 2025 Electronic Sound interview he went further, arguing AI produces only “pallid facsimiles” of human work, that it “analyses and steals and builds iterations without acknowledging the original human work it analysed,” and that the tech industry’s framing of artists as “creatives” reduces art to content for devices. The critique is notable for its precision: Yorke attacks the economics and the provenance, not the existence of the tools — a distinction consistent with a career spent using machines against machine culture.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/thom-yorke