Mick Jagger has given a qualified blessing to musicians who reach for artificial intelligence, on the strict condition that whatever comes out is genuinely their own.
“If someone wants to make music by AI, go ahead,” he told Billboard in a cover story published this week. “But it has to be original.”
The line arrives quickly, though, the moment the software starts to conjure an entire song that leans on somebody else’s catalogue, the kind of model often trained on scraped tracks without the artist’s say-so. That, for the 82-year-old, is where a tool stops being creative and starts being theft.
“There are people who use AI to just make a song from scratch, in the style of the Rolling Stones,” Jagger said. “If you were any kind of creative person, you wouldn’t do that.”
His objection is part principle, part self-defence. “Obviously I don’t want to be imitated by AI, vocally and instrumentally, and the band doesn’t,” he said, adding that anything engineered to “sound exactly like the Rolling Stones” was “obviously wrong”.
