Guns N’ Roses

Formed in Los Angeles in 1985 around Axl Rose, Slash and Duff McKagan, Guns N’ Roses turned Appetite for Destruction (1987) into the best-selling debut album in US history and sold over 100 million records worldwide. The classic lineup’s partial reunion in 2016 became one of the highest-grossing tours ever — and the band has kept experimenting, including with artificial intelligence.

An official AI music video

In January 2024, Guns N’ Roses released an official AI-generated video for “The General,” a Chinese Democracy-era track issued as a B-side to “Perhaps.” Made with creative director Dan Potter of London studio Creative Works, the clip follows “the subconscious of a young boy who stares down the monsters of dark childhood memories” and blends live concert footage — itself AI-augmented into a dystopian look — with morphing generated animation. The band’s announcement pitched the video as a continuation of its “longstanding historic tradition of bold visuals.”

Slash’s reservations

The band’s most famous guitarist is cooler on the technology than its video output suggests. Speaking to the Battleground Podcast in May 2024, Slash — a self-described analog recording loyalist — said that “having AI reproduce anything or actually produce anything original in terms of music does not really thrill me,” and predicted a flood of sameness: “there’s just gonna be too much of the same kind of look or sound for different things. I see it happening already.”

The split makes Guns N’ Roses a telling case: as an institution the band has put AI to work on its own art, while its members reserve the right to grumble about where everyone else will take it. Axl Rose — whose voice is among the most cloned on AI cover platforms — has stayed publicly silent on the technology.