07.11.2025: UK Music Chief Executive Tom Kiehl warned that some activities by Artificial Intelligence (AI) firms amounted to “pure theft” in an appearance before a House of Lords’ Committee probing the issue of AI and copyright. 

He spoke out when giving evidence to the House of Lords’ Communications and Digital Committee, chaired by Labour peer Baroness Keeley, on Tuesday November 4.

Asked if using other people’s work was not just merely using their creations as inspiration, Tom Kiehl responded: “I do not think it is inspiration. This is copy; this is pure theft. This is the situation we are dealing with. Copyright protects the right of a copy, and when you have systems trained on material you are ripping off the copy.”

Tom said, that while there were benefits from AI on the assistive side, there were a number of challenges that the music industry faced.

He said: “The big challenges are faced in some of the areas around generative AI. In particular, we are thinking about things like the mass scraping of works without consent.

“It is very concerning that that has been going on and that AI systems and large language models have been trained on music. We have seen examples such as the Anthropic legal case, where particular examples have been given regarding prompts that have been put in and then generated—verbatim copies of Gloria Gaynor or Louis Armstrong lyrics. Louis Armstrong did not even write the song, but it has shown the way that the systems are being trained on the back of creators and rights holders.

“There is another issue, which is competition with human-generated works. We have seen new pieces of work being generated and created in this way, particularly on a legal basis behind them, that are conflicting with legitimate sources. From a music industry perspective, we are striving to work with rights holders and creators to make sure that they get value for their works. For example, a French collecting society organisation and international collecting society organisations have indicated that there is a 24% potential loss of revenues by 2028 if things carry on as they are.

“Generally, around consumer confidence, there has been a lot of talk recently about what we consider to be AI slop—inferior and low-quality AI-generated systems, particularly streaming models, being very prevalent. I think that Deezer, which is a French digital platform available internationally, has seen around a 28% increase in AI-generated music content uploaded on its platform. That is up from 10% earlier this year.

“The copyright framework is fundamental. The issue around transparency is key for us. Unlocking some of those challenges around consent and getting more transparency is key to maybe some of the solutions that we need. We do not have that transparency at the moment, and that is a fundamental challenge.

“Also, there are issues around particularly the way music works in the online environment. A song is uploaded to a digital platform but then it can go to another user-generated content server such as YouTube. It can manifest in multiple ways, so it makes it very hard for rights holders and creators to enforce their rights in that way.

“They are what we call downstream copies. In terms of enforcing our rights and the way they are scraped, it is very challenging. Added to this is that a lot of the training of the AI systems takes place outside, in maybe more liberal regimes. When you think about some of the proposals the EU has around an EU AI Act, ensuring compliance with UK law for anything is key to the fundamental issues.

“At the end of the day, we must remember that in the music industry about 70% of the people who work in it are freelancers and self-employed. There are also a lot of small and medium enterprises. Their ability to navigate that process is very challenging. There are big players in the sector, which is important, but there are lots of smaller players, too.”