Phil Demmel on A.I. in Music: “I Think It’s Kind Of Cheating”

We’ve written so many articles about different musicians’ opinions on artificial intelligence (A.I.) in music, that it would be easier at this point if we just let A.I. write the articles for us. But we haven’t gotten that lazy at MetalSucks, at least not yet. In a recent interview with Metallerium (as transcribed by Blabbermouth), guitarist and member of too many bands to count, Phil Demmel, was asked his opinions on A.I. in music and he was pretty definitive on saying that he, himself, would never use A.I. to help write music:

“Yeah, that’s a hard one. Music-wise, I don’t see me using it for music, and I think that music should be a natural, genuine birth to something. I mean, yeah, you can have your outside influences, but those are all part of you and part of coming through you, not going, ‘Oh, I’m just gonna click up this and bring up this. I need a blah blah blah.’

“For art, that’s a tricky one for me. I think anything artificial like that, as far as you’re creating something, I think it’s kind of cheating. I’m not against it, because it happens all the time. I mean, bands rip off other bands all the time and people use other bits of stuff, but, for me, I see that as a shortcut a little bit. So I don’t think that I’d be into using it.”

While not the most damning language we’ve seen used on the subject, Demmel joins the ranks of metal musicians who have come out against A.I. including Judas Priest’s Ian Hill and Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor. So it seems like we won’t have to worry about Phil Demmel using anything but his own brain to come up with riffs in the future.