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”.
The fear is not hypothetical. Passable voice clones of living and dead singers have circulated online for a couple of years now, and the question of who owns a machine-made copy of an artist’s sound is still working its slow way through the courts.
The interview coincided with Foreign Tongues, the group’s 25th studio album, which landed on 10 July. Two years on from the Grammy-winning Hackney Diamonds, the band remain, improbably, a going commercial concern rather than a heritage exhibit.
Keith Richards, as ever, was blunter. “I’d rather hear something original,” he told the magazine. “Music could do a lot better than just trying to copy itself.”
He wanted “new input”, not “more and more copying and synthesizing”. Coming from a band that built an empire on borrowed American blues, the plea for originality carried a long and knotty history of its own.
There is a wrinkle, and it is the band’s. In May they released the video for the single “In the Stars”, which used deepfake technology to graft their younger faces, roughly circa 1968, onto performing actors.
The band frame that as a choice they made and controlled, which is precisely the point Jagger keeps circling. The distinction he returns to is between a tool an artist directs and a tool that quietly replaces the artist altogether.
In press for the album he has described AI as something that can “unstick” a writer who is blocked, a confidence prop as much as a collaborator. Seeing a machine produce something worse than your own instinct, he suggested, can be its own kind of reassurance.
His own experiments have been less than triumphant. Testing AI to help name an earlier record, he told The Times of London, “it came back with such rubbish, it didn’t help me at all”.
The industry around him has been rather less squeamish. Sony’s AI drummer can pass for a session player, Spotify has a conversational AI shaping what listeners hear, and wholly synthetic acts are already turning up on the charts.
None of which especially worries a man who has spent six decades outlasting predictions of his own obsolescence. Foreign Tongues drew warm notices, one review pitching it, cheekily, as a record aimed at the young, and it is holding its own without any digital help.
The irony he lives with is that pop has always run on imitation, one generation lifting from the last, the Stones themselves not excepted.
What he seems to be defending is not originality in the abstract so much as the human decision about what to borrow and why.
Jagger’s stance, in the end, is less a ban than a request. Use the machines all you like, he is saying, just do not use them to be him.
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