Cradle of Filth’s Dani Filth Blasts ‘Soulless’ AI in Music

Cradle of Filth founding frontman Dani Filth has never been one to shy away from sharing his unabashed opinion on… well, just about anything… but now he’s making it clear how he feels about the use of artificial intelligence in music, saying it’s “dangerous” and “shit.”

During a conversation with Spain’s Metal Journal, Filth was asked to weigh in on the use of AI in artistic mediums and he did not hold back. “It’s dangerous,” Filth said, as transcribed by Blabbermouth. The black metal singer then shared a story about a previous encounter with AI that left him “scared” for the future.

“I have a friend who is a computer programmer. He writes code for computer games and all kinds of weird and wonderful things, and last January I went for a meal at his house and he showed me something then that scared the shit outta me,” Filth recalled, “which was a program that was very new at the time where you could literally just type in what kind of music you wanted, what the lyrics should be about, how you want the video to look, what genre it should be — you put all these things in and five minutes later, you had a song.”

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“The trouble is it’s soulless, because essentially it’s just taking bits of information — millions — from around the web and binds them very quickly,” Filth went on to share. “And it learns. I know artists that are AI creators, and the longer they do it, the better it becomes.”

Filth then clarified, “But the trouble is it’s not just affecting… I mean, you get a painter, for example, or a band that spends a year writing an album, recording it, putting all the visuals together, releasing it. These things can do it almost instantaneously. So not only is it taking away from the entertainment industry, whether it’s music, art, theater, cinema, but as soon as it becomes attached to a physical robot, something that can physically do the job that his mind creates, then it’s gonna affect every walk of life.”

While he has a lot of reservations about the use of AI, Filth also noted that he is aware of some of its potential “benefits” as well. “I mean, it’s gonna have benefits, yeah. Everything has benefits,” he said. “There’ll be disabled people that will benefit from the use of AI There’ll be historians and things that just do work for you that make it easy. But that’s not the point. The point is it’s soulless. And it’s gonna make the human race not only lazy…”

Redirecting his thoughts, Filth said, “I mean, look at the way people are with music nowadays, with just having access to everything. There’s no soul searching, there’s no going to a record store and finding an album… There was something very spiritual about spending the time drifting from shop to shop looking [for an album you really wanted].”

“Now you just press a button,” Filth lamented. “And I think you lose the capacity to enjoy things as much… I do think that discovering bands and growing with bands and having them shape your parts of your life is important too.”

Finally, summing up his position, Filth said, “I think AI is shit. I think it is a danger. And I’m not talking about ‘Terminator’ robots and Skynet, although that could be a problem eventually, but I just think, for people’s spiritual growth, for the replacement of hard work of artists in whatever they do, whether it’s music, radio, TV, film, anything, I think it’s a bit of a problem.”