Devious riddle master Mick Jagger issues challenge to AI music makers: "It has to be original"

To be fair, we do get the general point that Jagger was trying to make, i.e., don’t use AI to just copy his voice and his bandmates’ music, because Mick Jagger definitely hates that: “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.” But he does not appear to have grasped the more general idea that all AI-made music—which can only be generated by models trained on a whole bunch of existing music, chopping and screwing those original compositions and then shitting out the resulting slurry—is copying somebody, even if it’s not him and Keith.

Jagger and the rest of the Stones haven’t been particularly militant on the AI count, given that they released a music video a few months back where they worked with the South Park guys’ deepfake studio to make them all look much younger. (Jagger had some critiques, of the actual output, though: “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 [Wood], and I said to the people working on it, ‘It looks more like Jeff Beck.’ So they had to do a bit extra work.”) 

Keith Richards, in the same interview, was more forthright and critical, and less inclined to setting questors impossible deeds: “I’d rather hear something original,” he noted. “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.”