Linkin Park

Formed in Agoura Hills, California in 1996, Linkin Park became the defining rock band of the 2000s: their debut Hybrid Theory (2000) is the best-selling debut album of the 21st century, and Meteora (2003) cemented a sound that fused metal, hip-hop and electronics. Frontman Chester Bennington died in July 2017; the band returned in 2024 with new co-vocalist Emily Armstrong and the album From Zero. Technological restlessness has always been part of the band’s identity — every album cycle chased new production tools, and Bennington-era deep cuts sat in digital archives waiting to be rediscovered.

An AI-made video for a lost song

On February 10, 2023, the band released “Lost,” a shelved Meteora-era track and the first unreleased Chester Bennington vocal to surface since his death, as the lead single of the Meteora 20th-anniversary box set. Its music video — reviving the anime aesthetic of 2003’s “Breaking the Habit” — was produced by Web3 studio Shibuya, directed by co-founders Maciej Kuciara and Emily “pplpleasr” Yang, with AI generation by the startup Kaiber. Mike Shinoda said discovering the track “was like finding a favorite photo you had forgotten you’d taken, like it was waiting for the right moment to reveal itself.”

When some fans bristled at the idea of an AI rendering Bennington, Shinoda took to Twitter to walk through the workflow: the directors drew original anime art, Kaiber’s AI was trained on that art, and the model was then applied to live-action footage of the band so the members took on the anime style. The point, he stressed, was that AI tied together two bodies of original, human-made content — it did not conjure the video from a prompt.

The choice stood out in a year when hundreds of musicians were signing protest letters like the Artist Rights Alliance’s. Linkin Park instead put generative tools in front of their most emotionally charged release — with consent, original art and full transparency about the process — extending Shinoda’s years of personal experiments with generative music and AI virtual artists.