Alice Cooper has issued a stark warning over his fears of an AI “rock star”.
The Poison frontman posed some thorny ethical questions about artificial intelligence during an interview with SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk, explaining how he could create a “rock star”.
“Well, here’s the deal, I could right now create a rock star,” Alice, 78, said. “I could create a Yungblud, a guy that’s really appealing, rock, tough, cool looking. I could create a guy named – I don’t care – Starboy or whatever, and make him look great. He doesn’t actually exist.”
The rock icon went on to describe the kind of AI-generated “rock star” he could invent.
“I could tell the AI, ‘I want him to sound like Tom Petty and Freddie Mercury. And here’s what the album’s about. Write the songs,'” he said. “Okay, now you’ve got a rock star that doesn’t exist, and you’ve got an album that doesn’t exist except in this world.”
However, Alice – who was born Vincent Damon Furnier but legally changed his name in 1975 – pointed out there would be no original artist to claim authorship of the music.
“What happens if it sells? Who gets the money? AI wrote the songs!” he said. “That’s gonna happen. You watch that happen, because the guy that just suggested what it should be did not write the songs.”
Another problem, Alice said, was the fact that AI “artists” had no lived experience of human emotion.
“If I could tell it to write a song about Eddie Trunk joining The Rolling Stones, they would write you a great song – except for one thing,” he declared. “The one thing it can’t do – it’s never been in love. It’s never had its heart broken. It’s never been angry. It’s never been happy.”
This, he said, made it next to impossible for audiences to connect with AI-generated music.
“It has no emotion,” Alice said. “It has no heart, it has no feel, has no soul to it, and that’s where it dies right there.
