Mick Jagger has a balanced view on the use of artificial intelligence in music. The Rolling Stones singer spoke about it in an interview with the American edition of Billboard explaining that he is not prejudiced against AI as long as it is used in an original and creative way.
«Obviously» says Jagger «I don't want to be imitated by artificial intelligence, neither vocally nor instrumentally, and the same goes for the band. I don't want people to just put out stuff that sounds exactly like the Rolling Stones, of course that's wrong. But if someone wants to make music with AI, go ahead as long as the result is original: you have to put your input and your ideas into it. There are people using AI to simply create a song from scratch, Rolling Stones style. Minimally creative people don't do that.”
Keith Richards also talks about it in the same interview: «I prefer original things. Music could do better than try to copy itself. After all, these are pretty simple things: we're not talking about Beethoven or Bach, and I have no doubt that AI can do that, so what? We want new ideas. We don't want more and more copies and summaries.”
In the interview we also talk about the video of In the Starsfrom Foreign Tongueswhere the band's musicians are played by actors whose faces have been transformed with the deepfake technique to resemble those of the Stones from fifty-odd years ago.
“They are real musicians who are a bit like the Rolling Stones of 1968,” says Jagger. «The only thing changed were the faces. They worked on mine first: it looked like me, but it wasn't really me, it looked like one of my kids at 23 or so. Then I saw Ronnie and told whoever was working on it that he looked like Jeff Beck. They had to work at it a little harder.” Richards' comment: «Very nice. I wish I still looked like that.”
