“The spirit of rock needs to have a touch of danger about it”: Why former Scorpions guitarist Uli Jon Roth isn’t concerned about AI in rock musicWith the increasing quality of AI-powered music generators, some musicians are rightly worried about what the future holds for the industry. Hell, the Velvet Sundown recently managed to amass hundreds of thousands of listeners before it was revealed it was all an AI hoax.
But should musicians be that concerned? Former Scorpions guitarist Uli Jon Roth has joined the growing chorus of other industry veterans like ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus who say artificial intelligence doesn’t herald the doomsday hellscape some believe it will.

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“There’s now the trend of making all the vocals using pitch correctors, to the point where it becomes ridiculous,” Roth tells Metal Roos [via Blabbermouth]. “They’re taking away the essence of human expression and turning the voices into robot voices…
“Because I guess a lot of the younger kids, they’re used to all that because a lot of what we get now on social media or whatever is completely manufactured and absolutely not real.
“And the borders between real and what’s not real are very shifting and it’s coming to the point with AI that you really very often don’t know whether it was machine-made or computer-made, digital, or whether it was actually flesh and blood in front of you.
“That’s actually a very interesting development, I find, and I’m not scared about it. I’m rolling with the punches there. But a lot of people are threatened, and I understand that.”
Roth adds that the emergence of AI is actually in keeping with the “spirit of rock”, which he says “needs to have a touch of danger about it”.
“I’m not really interested in perfection in rock,” he explains. “In fact, it’s almost anathema, because the original rock was not perfect. It came like almost a revolutionary kind of thing. [It] burst onto the scene with a completely new sound, a new attitude, a new way of playing music. And this is what I am always tapping into when I’m playing that kind of music.
“It needs to have that kind of frontier spirit almost. If you take that away, it loses the very essence of it.

In other news, Dustin Ballard, the brains behind AI parody music YouTube channel There I Ruined It, recently gave a TED talk about the ethics of using AI in music creation.
“Is AI music real music? I believe that when it’s in the hands of musicians, it can be,” he explained.
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