Alex Van Halen has reached out to OpenAI in the hopes of creating new Eddie Van Halen guitar riffs and solosGenerative AI is rapidly becoming more sophisticated, and can already create incredibly believable sonic recreations of existing music artists. Just look at There I Ruined It – a YouTube channel and Instagram page which posts ridiculous AI-generated versions of classic songs – to see what it’s already capable of.
And some are looking to AI to create totally new music in the style of deceased artists as a means to keep their legacies alive, but not everyone is convinced of the ethics of this practice.

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For example, few guitarists hold quite the same iconic status as Eddie Van Halen, and so the demand to hear “new music” from him four years after his death remains strong. 
As such, Alex Van Halen has revealed that he’s reached out to ChatGPT creator OpenAI to explore the possibility of generating new riffs and solos in the style of his late sibling.
Speaking to Rolling Stone while promoting his new book Brothers, Alex details the “oceanic grief” he felt after losing Eddie, and his plans for Van Halen’s extensive archive.
Van Halen released 12 studio albums over the course of their near-50-year career, but there are plenty of unreleased and unheard audio bites in the band’s archives, according to AVH. “They’re all little pieces,” he notes. “A bunch of licks don’t make a song.”
He goes on to reveal that he’s reached out to OpenAI about analysing “the patterns of how Edward would have played something”, in the hopes of generating new riffs and solos. Whether such a project will actually happen remains to be seen, but there are several ethical hurdles to vault before it does.
For a start, Eddie Van Halen’s son Wolfgang has repeatedly shared his reservations about releasing music from the band’s archives. “I really don’t appreciate when artists pass and you see their families release everything,” he said last year.
When our sister publication Guitar.com shared Alex Van Halen’s plans to work with OpenAI on new EVH material on Facebook, comments were divided. “Like it or not, this will be commonplace in the near future,” one user wrote. Another was far more critical: “No one wants to hear ‘AI EVH’, Alex!” they wrote. “Just give us the music, as it is. We all understand the circumstances, and we do not want or need AI to step in and finish the job.”
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