DEVIN TOWNSEND On Use Of A.I. In Music: 'It's Too Early For Me To Have Internalized Exactly What I Feel About It'

In a new interview with Italy's TrueMetal.it, Canadian visionary musician, composer, and producer Devin Townsend weighed in on the growing popularity of artificial intelligence (A.I.) in music, particularly as relates to its possibilities and its implications in terms of the way we make, produce and distribute music. Asked how he feels about A.I. and if he thinks it "actually poses a danger to musicians", Devin said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Well, what do I feel about it? It's too early for me to have internalized exactly what I feel about it. What it has made me recognize, though, is that my perfectionist ways in the past, once confronted with perfect images, technically perfect images, like a lot of what A.I. can do — a couple of prompts and you can make METALLICA a funk band, and it's convincing, or you type in a bunch of words and it's an artistic rendering of an image that is just with precision that would take any normal person a year to do — what it has made me recognize is that our value as creators has much less to do with the perfection that we're chasing and more to do with our natures. If we can represent with some sort of authority and some sort of confidence our true nature, including the imperfections, including the mistakes, including the warts and the human aspect of it, A.I. provides a wonderful mirror for what is really important about human art. And I think it can even be described in some ways, it's the struggle. It's the struggle to keep going. It's a struggle to rationalize any creative avenue that seems in opposition to a fundamentally abstract existence. The humanity of human creative ventures, I think, have had a light shone on it by the speed and the perfection of A.I."

Devin, who released his ambitious, orchestral-metal opus "The Moth" on May 29 via InsideOut Music, continued: "I didn't think it was as big a deal in the beginning. I had hired an animator to do the entire 'Moth' story in hand-drawn animation, but his life went sideways and he ended up going through serious depression and he fell off the map. So at the end, I had to come up with money to pay for somebody to make visuals for the show, and they used A.I. for the show. And we got a huge backlash from it. And all I can say about it is I paid somebody a lot of money to do it, and we learnt our lesson as a result of that. So now moving forward, any A.I. that gets used in our work is either something that I don't know about or maybe some visual effect or something. But it's a little contentious of a topic for me, and I'm still confused about it."

Elaborating on how his opinion of A.I. in music has evolved in recent months, Devin said: "It's almost like the perfection that I was chasing as a musician, when I finally heard or saw what perfection on a technical level looks and sounds like, I was, like, 'Oh, it leaves me cold in a way.' The ease in which that perfection was achieved with A.I. makes the struggle to find perfection in my work up to that point seem just ridiculous. So now the focus becomes much more on the process, it becomes much more on the thing that drove us to create. That's much more of a commodity now than perfect. And that's good."

Earlier this month, Devin announced a return to live activity, with a European solo tour set to take place in September and October 2026. Townsend will perform a range of tracks from his 31-strong studio album discography across a range of different artist projects, including PUNKY BRÜSTER, CASUALTIES OF COOL, DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT and the genre-defining STRAPPING YOUNG LAD.

The "Metamorphosis" solo tour offers a rare unfiltered opportunity to see Devin back on stage, performing solo at 23 shows across 10 different countries in Europe. In typical Townsend fashion, expect the unexpected with a varied setlist that will doubtless change night by night, and, of course, a few (bizarre) surprises along the way.