Shinedown's Zach Myers Rejects AI Songwriting: 'Don't Use A.I. To Do Your Work'
Shinedown guitarist Zach Myers said AI music generators produce obviously inferior work and called on musicians to write from lived experience instead.
"That's awful," Myers said in a recent interview with Primordial Radio about songwriting with AI tools. "You can hear it, dude. It's so bad."
Myers drew a distinction between using AI for research and using it to compose. He uses ChatGPT daily for questions, he said, but never to write songs or collaborate on music.
"How about you actually live a little life, go through some shit, and then write a song about it?" Myers said.
He compared the trend to broader technology adoption patterns. "Everything starts with a good purpose, right? Everything. The Internet started with a good purpose. Now it's just us talking shit about each other."
Myers argued that audiences can detect AI-generated material. "You can fool some of the people some of the time; you cannot fool all the people all the time," he said. "And I think when you start doing that, you're getting into a dangerous game, man."
He cited the band's track record: "We got 24 Number Ones without using a computer."
Shinedown's Album Confirms No AI Use
Singer Brent Smith confirmed last month that no AI was used on the band's eighth studio album, "Ei8ht," released May 29.
Smith emphasized human connection as central to music creation. "There's an energy between people that are alive," he said. "And there's something incredible about when you put human beings in a room with each other and give them instruments."
Producer Eric Bass, the band's bassist, treats software as a starting point rather than a finished product. When he uses a program to generate a sequence, Bass reworks it manually to find authentic versions. "If he's using it as a template, it inspires him to do something else that takes him down a different road," Smith explained.
Smith acknowledged AI's value in healthcare and disease research but separated those applications from creative work. "When it comes to the health care community and it comes to A.I. being used to figure out how to cure diseases or how to fundamentally create treatments for the betterment of human beings and their physical health, that's a different animal," he said.
The Rights and Soul Question
Smith raised a practical concern: who owns rights to AI-generated music? More fundamentally, he questioned whether machines can match human emotional impact.
"I haven't heard a song created by A.I. that's made the hair on the back of my neck stand up," Smith said.
He invoked Friedrich Nietzsche's observation that "without music, life would be a mistake." Sound patterns and human voices trigger physical responses that Smith sees as irreplaceable.
Smith also referenced science fiction warnings. "When you think about books like '1984' and you think about 'Ender's Game' and you think about 'Terminator' - we made movies about artificial intelligence, 'I, Robot', and it did not turn out very well," he said.
For writers navigating similar questions about AI for Writers, the Shinedown members' stance reflects a growing debate about where tools end and creation begins.
Shinedown begins its "Dance, Kid, Dance Act II" world tour this summer, hitting 54 dates across 11 countries with Coheed and Cambria, Black Stone Cherry, and other acts.
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