Jack Antonoff is taking aim at music created with the use of artificial intelligence as he prepares to release his rock band Bleachers’ fifth studio album.
The Grammy Award-winning producer, scheduled to perform at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre on Sept. 17, has been sharing typed-out journal entries to Instagram ahead of releasing “everyone for ten minutes” on May 22. His most recent post touches on the process of creating art.
“What we do is an ancient ritual,” Antonoff wrote on Wednesday, May 13. “You don’t have to write music anymore, you don’t have to record it and you don’t have to bring the band out and play it. And yet for us, the idea of optimizing what we do is a complete miss of the entire point of what compels us in the first place.”
The use of AI-generated content in Hollywood and the arts has been a contentious topic in recent years, as the technology continues to infiltrate the film and music industries, causing many to argue that it is taking the jobs from real creatives.
“To everyone who is gassed up about the new ways you can fake making art, by all means drive off that cliff,” he wrote. “Nothing more embarrassing than considering there is a way to optimize that holy process. Godless whores.”
Though he has been making music as part of Bleachers since 2013, Antonoff is best known for producing hits for pop stars such as Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde and Sabrina Carpenter.
Antonoff’s collaborator SZA also spoke out against the technology earlier this year, telling i-D magazine that she was “at war because of AI.” She noted that it felt as though AI-generated music was being made “disproportionately with Black music,” and took issue with the “weird, stereotypical struggle music” that it creates.
Other artists, however, such as Boy George and Liza Minnelli, have openly defended their use of AI.
Antonoff’s forthcoming Berkeley performance with Bleachers will mark the group’s return to the Bay Area for the first time since performing at Golden Gate Park for San Francisco’s Outside Lands music festival last summer. During its midday set, Antonoff invited his father, Rick, onstage for a rendition of “How Dare You Want More.”
Bleachers is now gearing up to tour “everyone for ten minutes” starting June 5 in Chicago. After stopping through parts of Canada and playing a five-show residency in Los Angeles, the trek is set to wrap up in Nashville on Oct. 8.