My name is Elliot Swift. I’m a singer songwriter and I live in Northwest London and I have been making and performing music for the last 6 years. I’m 27 and I began writing songs when I was 21 which is a later than usual start for most musicians. I have been singing and performing since I was a teenager. I am an active musician and performer. I have written more than a hundred songs by myself. I am also a self taught guitarist and producer. 


I have started this petition because over the last couple of years I have observed a change in society and pop culture. We are currently living in very strange times. Times that we used to write about and fictionalise. Twenty years ago, there was no such thing as AI. AI stands for artificial intelligence to give it the full name. This was the term that everyone used as back then it was neither common knowledge or possible. A being of human intelligence without human form. This is one of but not the only definition for AI. Now in 2025, we have the first iterations of this technology. AI is finally real but like anything that exists and is accessible to the public, it is being misused. It is misused in both threatening and non threatening ways. Dangerous and not so dangerous ways. AI needs to be controlled and have better regulations surrounding it and its use. 

This is a petition to stop AI and the use of it in the UK to create music. Whether it be lyrics, melody, composition, or even arrangement. The reason I am addressing this area of AI is due to the fact that over the last year, real people, and working musicians, are losing opportunities to make and perform music that is entirely a product of their own abilities and their own self expression. Instead these opportunities are being lost out to AI. This may be due to the shared idea that because an artificially intelligent system has produced musical bodies of work, that anything written, recorded, or engineered by a human being stands as being inferior, comparably worse, or of lower quality. I myself am one of the many people in the UK and in the world who is affected by AI and its misuse. Someone has to take a stand against it in order to give musicians a fighting chance to succeed at what they have worked their whole lives to be.

The stakes of not changing the laws around AI span from the total replacement of human made music with AI music to the total replacement of all artistic expression, whether it be music, film, games, etc. All emerging pop culture is at risk of being replaced by the work of AI. Whether or not a piece of music created by a person is subjectively better or worse than the AI is irrelevant. A piece of music created by AI is inauthentic. Self expression is authentic. By this logic, art that is not made by a real person is by definition, inauthentic. AI should not be allowed to imitate authenticity. 

This month, BBC Introducing who are supposed to champion underground artists, had Papi Lamour, an AI artist on one of their shows. Papi Lamour created a song entirely out of AI and did not use any knowledge, skill, or even music theory to make this song. This caused a lot of controversy and real musicians wrote to BBC radio to express their frustration, anger, and disappointment in the decision to play the artists song. A platform for real musicians to showcase their work on national radio with a national audience was given to a machine, who did not have to learn anything, or overcome any adversity or personal struggle, to have its music played. This is shocking and insulting, and it has to stop. 

In summary, this is a petition to have a national ban on the use of AI in music. Now is the time. If we don’t do this now, it will be done to us later. AI is not music. AI is AI. It does not feel anything. It is told what to feel. Music is feeling and real human emotion, perhaps in its purest and most authentic form. So please, sign this petition, and let’s work together to change the laws. Ban AI from all streaming services and radio stations in the UK. Better yet, if we can make the case for its misuse, we can fight to criminalise the fraudulent use of AI in music. Let’s end the greatest threat to the music industry once and for all.