Keith Richards

Keith Richards (born 1943 in Dartford, England) has supplied the Rolling Stones’ riffs for over sixty years and cultivated rock’s most durable persona: the human who outlasts everything. Technology is not part of the act — he says his daily engagement with it stops at the electric kettle, and that the world “would be better off without the damn phone.”

A tool, a toy, and a fear

His verdict on AI, delivered to The Guardian in June 2026, was unusually dark even by his curmudgeonly standards: “AI is killing me,” he said, fearing not just for music’s future but “for the future of everything.” Having watched recording go from two-track tape to digital, he judged that the whole technological ascent “hasn’t really helped the music at all.”

Around the Stones’ 2026 album “Foreign Tongues,” he sharpened the musical objection in Billboard: AI “can either be a tool, or it can be a toy,” and what it mostly does — imitation — is what music needs least. “We don’t want more and more copying and synthesizing,” he said. “Surely there’s enough originality without having to copy nursery rhymes.”

When Mick Jagger used AI face technology to de-age the band in the “In the Stars” video, Richards signed off with a shrug — “Very nice. I wish I looked like that now. But maybe that’s what they’re good for — music videos.” Put it in its proper place, in other words: anywhere but the music.