Joris de Man
Video Game Composer
BAFTA-winning composer of the Killzone and Horizon games, who told Edge magazine that using generative AI for creative art feels “insane,” and criticized major AI companies for training on artists’ work first and worrying about licensing later.
In his words
The nerdy side of me goes: “Oh, wow, this is quite cool.” But the more creative and artistic side of me goes: “This is f*cking insane.”
They could have said, “OK, we need to license the stuff that we’ve used,” but they’ve decided to go the other way — “We’ll train on everything we can find, and we’ll worry about the legal ramifications later.”
Biography
Joris de Man is a Dutch composer best known for his sweeping orchestral and electronic scores for Guerrilla Games — the Killzone shooters and the acclaimed Horizon series, Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West. His work has earned a BAFTA and helped define the modern sound of AAA game music.
Craft against convenience
In a 2026 interview with Edge magazine, de Man drew a sharp line between his technical curiosity and his artistic conscience. The engineer in him finds generative AI interesting; the composer in him finds using it for creative art insane. He located the value of music in exactly what AI smooths away — the human mistakes and unexpected accidents that give a score its life, versus the frictionless perfection of a machine.
His ethical objection is pointed at the industry’s biggest players. AI companies, he argued, faced a fork in the road: license the material they trained on, or take everything they could find and deal with the legal consequences afterward — and they chose the latter. It is a critique aimed less at the tools than at how they were built, aligning him with fellow game composers like Nobuo Uematsu who have declined to touch generative AI.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/joris-de-man