Jack White

Jack White (born John Anthony Gillis, 1975, Detroit) formed the White Stripes with Meg White in 1997 and wrote “Seven Nation Army,” the riff that became a global stadium chant. Through Third Man Records, founded in 2001, he has spent two decades as rock’s loudest evangelist for analog craft — recording to tape, pressing vinyl in his own plants, and locking fans’ phones in pouches at his shows. That worldview — real people, real rooms, real sound — set the stage for his collisions with AI.

From stolen songs to synthetic speech

In September 2024, after a Donald Trump campaign aide posted a video scored to “Seven Nation Army,” White fired off an Instagram warning — “Oh….Don’t even think about using my music, you fascists” — and he and Meg White filed a federal copyright suit against the campaign days later (they dropped it, without prejudice, after the election). Skirmishes with Trump’s orbit kept coming: when the White House called him a “washed-up, has-been loser” for mocking the gilded Oval Office redecoration in 2025, White called the insult a “badge of honor.”

The fight turned fully synthetic in December 2025, when Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee — White’s home-state congressman — reposted an AI-generated clip of White appearing to snarl “Don’t even think about listening to my music, you fascists,” a machine-warped echo of White’s own 2024 post, with a jab at the musician’s looks attached. White’s Instagram response was volcanic: he expressed disbelief that a sitting congressman would “repost an AI generated video, containing a false comment that I never said,” and asked what kind of joke Americans were now living in.

White has never issued a manifesto about generative AI in music-making; his war is narrower and hotter — against fabricated speech put in his mouth and his art conscripted without consent. But from a man who still cuts records to tape and bans phones from his gigs, the deepfake episode read less like a one-off grievance than the confirmation of a lifelong thesis about what happens when machines get between artists and the truth.