Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are both apprehensive about using artificial intelligence to make music. In a recent interview with Billboard, Rolling Stones‘ Glimmer Twins said they believed people should use AI only if they put their own thought into it, and anything else is lazy.
“Obviously I don’t want to be imitated by AI, vocally and instrumentally, and the band doesn’t,” Jagger said. “I don’t want people just putting stuff out there that can sound exactly like the Rolling Stones — I think that’s obviously wrong. If someone wants to make music by AI, go ahead. But it has to be original — you have to have your own input and your own thoughts. There are people who use AI to just make a song from scratch, in the style of the Rolling Stones. If you were any kind of creative person, you wouldn’t do that.”
“I’d rather hear something original,” Richards said. “Music could do a lot better than just trying to copy itself. After all, it’s pretty simple stuff — this is not Beethoven or Bach, and I’ve no doubt AI can do that, but so what? We want new input. We don’t want more and more copying and synthesizing. … Surely there’s enough originality without having to copy nursery rhymes.”
That said, they got a kick out of using deepfake technology, which is AI-adjacent, for their music video for “In the Stars,” a track off their recent Foreign Tongues album. In the clip, actors play the Stones’ instruments but their faces look like those of the Stones’ half a century ago. “The musicians are real musicians that look a bit like the Rolling Stones in 1968,” Jagger told Billboard. “The only thing was the faces. So they worked on mine first, and it kind of looked like me, but not really — like one of my children when they were 23 or something. And then I saw Ronnie, and I said to the people working on it, ‘It looks more like Jeff Beck.’ So they had to do a bit extra work.”
“I said, ‘Very nice. I wish I looked like that now,’” Richards said.
In the Billboard interview, Jagger also weighed in on Olivia Rodrigo’s rock music since both she and the Stones welcomed the Cure’s Robert Smith as a guest on their 2026 albums. “She’s really good at [rock music],” Jagger said. “Everyone thought she was a different kind of singer, but there’s quite a few female singers that have made that transition. It’s not a permanent transition necessarily, but the ability to change styles from what you think their original girly pop stuff is — it’s kind of interesting.”
The Stones have yet to announce any live performances around the release of Foreign Tongues, though in the Billboard article, Richards said he wasn’t ruling out 2027.
