KISS’s Gene Simmons on AI in music industry: ‘Learn how to use it, otherwise it will use you’
Gene Simmons telling musicians to get on board with AI is about what you'd expect from someone who's spent decades treating rock as a business as much as an art form. He's not wrong that the technology isn't going away. The question of whether it's good or bad for music has been asked about synthesizers, drum machines, autotune, and streaming, and every time the industry found a way to survive and often profit.
I land somewhere in the middle. AI as a tool for songwriters and producers to spark ideas or handle tedious mixing work could be genuinely useful. But the fear that labels will use it to replace human writers and session players is real, and it's not paranoia. The money question matters too. If an AI generates a melody that sounds like a KISS song, who gets paid?
I'd want to hear Simmons get specific. Does he think AI should be writing lyrics and hooks from scratch, or just helping polish what humans make? And what does he say about copyright when a machine is trained on thousands of existing songs? That's where the real fight will be, and a few sentences on a cable news show won't settle it.