Jack Antonoff Slams AI Music Use, Says Songwriting Has Become an “Ancient Ritual”

Jack Antonoff has never been shy about taking a public swing at the music business, and this week his target was the growing wave of AI-generated music. On Wednesday, May 13, the Bleachers frontman posted a message to fans on Instagram that dismissed so-called musicians using artificial intelligence to make songs, while framing actual songwriting as something closer to ceremony than content production.

“What we do has become an ancient ritual,” Antonoff wrote. “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.” He went on to argue that the push to optimize music-making misses the point entirely for artists who still see the work as something internal and human.

“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,” he continued. “So to everyone who is gassed up about the new ways you can fake making art, by all means drive right off that cliff. We’re genuinely happy to see you go … godless whores.”

The remarks were blunt even by Antonoff standards, though they fit a broader pattern. The Grammy-winning producer has increasingly positioned himself as one of the more outspoken major figures willing to challenge the direction the industry is taking, especially when it comes to technology, ownership, and the economics around live music. In the same post, he suggested that much of the enthusiasm around AI is coming from people outside the creative core. “It’s mainly the out of touch shouting about following this nightmare,” he wrote, while adding that “the new artists I know are genuinely uninterested in anything that doesn’t come from within.”

Antonoff’s comments arrive after a stretch in which he has also been vocal about the concert industry’s monopoly power. In an October conversation with Hayley Williams for Rolling Stone, he said, “You and your band can’t turn a profit, and then we have to watch the companies that own all these rooms and monopolize the whole f—ing thing and post billions of earnings.” That frustration has spilled into lighter jabs as well: in April, after Ticketmaster posted about having successfully “caught” scalpers using its services, Antonoff responded on X, “You caught you?”

For an artist who has spent years moving between pop’s upper tier and more independent-minded circles, the latest post reads less like a one-off outburst than a familiar warning flare. In Antonoff’s telling, the pressure to automate and flatten music-making is not innovation so much as the latest way to detach art from the people making it.

Jack Antonoff speaks onstage at Variety Hitmakers 2025 on Dec. 6, 2025, in Los Angeles.

Gilbert Flores/Variety