Mike Shinoda

Born in 1977 in Agoura Hills, California, Mike Shinoda co-founded Linkin Park in 1996 and shaped its sound as rapper, co-vocalist, producer and keyboardist. A trained illustrator with a degree from Art Center College of Design, he has always worked across music, visual art and technology — from his Fort Minor side project to producing the band’s post-Chester Bennington return.

Generative before it was cool

Shinoda was talking up music AI years before the generative boom. In a June 2021 Rolling Stone interview he revealed he was an investor working with Authentic Artists, a startup building AI-driven virtual performers whose music “gets made from scratch in real-time,” and marveled at how quickly the systems produced credible songs — while predicting that humans would stay in charge of taste. That December he released ZIGGURATS, which he called a “generative mixtape”: an NFT collection inspired by projects like CryptoPunks, where a program he devised recombined his own beats, sketches and artwork so that every copy shared his vocals but carried unique music and cover art.

In February 2023 he became the public face of Linkin Park’s AI-assisted “Lost” video, made with the startup Kaiber, patiently explaining on Twitter that the AI had been trained on the directors’ original anime art and applied to real band footage. Months later he pushed back the other way, tweeting that “tech bros” predicting AI would replace human music “need to get out and see a concert.”

In an October 2023 Billboard interview on his tech investing, he acknowledged that AI “blew up very big, very fast” and that artists were rattled by models trained on copyrighted work — arguing it is the artist’s job “to protect the work, to put a value on it.” His position is consistent: embrace the tools, keep humans as the decision-makers, and defend the value of the underlying human art.