The Rolling Stones used AI, and nobody cared

Ask a Rolling Stone about large language models in the 1960’s, and they’d likely assume you were enquiring after either their frontman’s generous lips, or else one of the amazonian women hanging around their afterparties.

Fast-forward to today, and those famous lips are a little more lined, the afterparties finish a lot earlier, and the octogenarians have released a music video that makes heavy use of AI.

Why does this matter? ‘Stones release record’ is not in itself a story. In fact, it’s happened about once every three years since JFK was president.

What’s notable about this release is that amidst a growing AI backlash, particularly amongst creatives, the reception to the Stones illustrates what otherwise sckeptical audiences are willing to accept, and what they aren’t.

So, at the risk of sounding like a country magistrate slamming their morning paper down in disgust – how do they get away with it?

First it helps to reiterate what the video is. The de-aged Stones play a hangar-like room, with a squadron of drummers standing in for the now deceased Charlie Watts. Actress of the moment Odessa D’Azion struts back and forth, much as she does in Madonna’s “Confessions II”, combining a willingness to appear in music videos with a reluctance to do so for any artists under retirement age.

The use of AI in de-ageing the Stones and returning them to their 60s heyday is the entire point of the video. And when we analyse the social conversation taking place around the video, it reveals a specific permission structure in which the band operates.

Legacy immunity.

The Stones’ 60+ year career creates a reservoir of goodwill that absorbs the AI controversy. The audience’s primary relationship is with the music and the mythology, not with the production method. When the music is good (and “In The Stars” was received positively), the AI question becomes secondary.

Of course, this immunity is not total – as Darren Aronofsky, Lady Gaga and all the other creatives publicly burned for their dalliance with AI would affirm. It necessarily exists in tandem with several other conditions.

Secondary output.

There appears to be a greater degree of permissiveness amongst audiences when artists use AI on an output that’s not their ‘core’ offering. In this instance, the music video clearly comes secondary to the primary output of the song, which is entirely human-generated. A corollary might be trailers relative to full movies.

Nostalgia framing.

The de-aging concept specifically invokes nostalgia: “the Stones when they were young.” This reframes AI from “replacing human creativity” to “recovering human memory.” Analysis highlighted a cluster (keywords: dracula, fangs) that suggested some found the execution uncanny, but the concept of seeing young Mick and Keith again has inherent emotional appeal.

This last point is the key one, and hinges on the idea of the artist ‘earning’ the right to use AI while still retaining their audience’s attention and loyalty. The issue many creatives have with AI outputs is that the person producing them seems to have performed a short-cut. They haven’t tried, and tried again, and come up with something distinctly human for all their trying and failing. No one could accuse the Stones of not putting their years, health, several marriages and more besides into their music.

If an artist is seen to have given time, thought and energy to the creative process, and uses AI to help generate content that supports what is undoubtedly human-made, then every indication suggests that their audiences will be far more receptive to what they produce with it.

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