Neural networks will not be able to tear live chicks apart on stage.
The 78-year-old musician shared his vision of the future of rock music, where artificial intelligence could create fully formed "stars" that do not exist in reality. These stars would release successful albums devoid of any emotion.
According to Cooper, technology has advanced to the point where a convincing, audience-demanded artist can be created from scratch in just a few days.
"I could create a new rock star right now," the rocker explains. "I could create, for example, another Yungblud, a guy who would be really cool, tough, and visually appealing. His name could be… it doesn’t matter what, maybe Starboy or something else, and he would be excellent. Only he wouldn’t exist in reality."
"I could tell the neural network: I want him to sound like Tom Petty and Freddie Mercury, and here’s what I need for the album. Let’s write songs. And there you have a rock star that doesn’t exist, with an album that’s somewhere online. And what happens if it starts selling well? Who gets the money? After all, the songs were written by AI."
In Alice Cooper's view, the music industry is navigating a legal and creative minefield. "This is all going to happen. You’ll see some guy who has never lived write all these songs."
"If I could ask AI to write a song about how Eddie Trunk (an American rock music historian and radio host – ed. note) joined the Rolling Stones, it would do a great job, and the song would turn out wonderful. Everything is great except for one thing – it, the artificial intelligence – has never been in love. It has never had its heart broken. It has never been angry at anyone. And it has never been happy."
Music written by neural networks will always lack the emotional core that defines all rock music. And as long as artificial intelligence cannot replicate that human spark, its creations will be empty. "But someday this will happen, and then I just can’t imagine what will become of rock music."
Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier on February 4, 1948, in Detroit) is an American rock singer and songwriter. Cooper was one of the first shock rockers and became, as noted by All Music Guide, the king of this genre, radically expanding the boundaries of what a rock artist could do on stage.
A key event in the band's history occurred at a concert in Toronto in September 1969, which, according to Cooper himself, was pure coincidence. Somehow, during the performance, a chicken ended up on stage. Cooper, knowing nothing about domestic animals, assumed that if it had wings, it could fly. He picked up the chicken and threw it into the crowd, and instead of flying away, it fell into the front rows, where there were people in wheelchairs who (according to some reports) began to tear it apart.
The next day, the incident was covered in many publications, and Zappa called Alice to ask if it was true that he had decapitated the chicken on stage and drank its blood. Cooper denied it, but Frank, realizing that the scandal could be invaluable for the band, advised him not to deny the rumor anymore. Thus, the "chicken incident" not only made the front pages of newspapers but also marked the beginning of a new genre that soon became known as shock rock.
