LACUNA COIL's ANDREA FERRO On Artificial Intelligence In Music: 'There's Times To Use It, There's Time Not To Use It'

In a new interview with Neil Jones of TotalRock, singer Andrea Ferro of Italian goth metal veterans LACUNA COIL weighed in on a debate about people using an A.I. (artificial intelligence) music generator as a tool to create melodies, harmonies and rhymes based on artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithms and machine learning (M.L.) models. Andrea said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I think you can't fight the progress. Evolution is gonna come no matter what. But you can try to be smart about it. I'm not against artificial intelligence if it's used as a tool to help you, to make your life easier, to make your life better. But don't overuse it. I think there's times to use it, there's time not to use it. And it's a thin line, which is not easy to understand for many people."

Referencing the fact that an A.I.-generated band called VELVET SUNDOWN recently raked in more than 900,000 listeners on Spotify alone just one month after releasing its first songs in June, Andrea said: "I think artificial bands — not very useful to me, because they're always gonna take inspiration from something that already exists, while I think the human mistakes are what makes art unique. When you make a mistake and you go a direction you [weren't] expecting to go, that's where it gets interesting and curious and extreme. And so that's the missing part for something artificial to be creative, I think."

Andrea previously talked about the use of artificial intelligence in music this past March in an interview with Keefy of Ghost Cult magazine. He said at the time: "I think technology, as usual, is not good or bad. It depends the way you use it. If it's an extra tool to make your life easier and faster, that's okay. But if it has to substitute the creativity of a person, that I don't like personally. I prefer to use human creativity because humans are great because they make mistakes, and from a mistake, usually that's where great things happen. Whatever you do — you write a book, you write a song, you write a movie — when you fuck up or you make a mistake, and you can go there and see and realize what's special, how special it becomes with the mistakes, that's where you find a new way. You learn something new, you create something new and unique because you never would have thought about it in the correct way. So I think that can't be replaced by machine, at least not yet. And so I think human touch is very important. And there's no need to use A.I. [art for album covers]. If you find the right artist, it's not even that expensive. I think it's reasonably expensive and it's deserved and you can still make money on the merchandise and other things. So it's an excuse for laziness to don't use a real artist, I think, I think A.I. is cool and it can be helpful, but it has to be used with your brain."

Last year, Andrea's bandmate, LACUNA COIL singer Cristina Scabbia told Brazil's Sonoridades Inc. about A.I. in music: "I still have to know more about A.I. My first impression is that I hate it deeply. I think that it could be interesting and useful in many ways. But what humans are capable of, it's never 100 percent good. So I know that it will go downward. I mean, we could use it to explore galaxies, we could use it to get better in medicines and science, but I know that a lot of people will be using it for bad reasons.

"Speaking about music, I am confident that the creativity that a human being with emotions, with a soul can have will not be comparable, hopefully ever, to A.I.," she continued. "I think about songs like — I don't know — the one of THE POLICE, 'De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da, is all I want to say to you.' And A.I. would be scratching the forehead, if it had one, and say, like, 'What is this? What does it mean?' But it sounds good. It's rhythmically good. It works with that voice.

"There are so many things you have to bring together to write music, to [put] emotion [across to] other people, to give the emotion that for A.I., it's difficult to bring this emotion because it doesn't have one — yet," Scabbia added. "But my actual opinion is just, like, I want to continue to write music without A.I. for a long time… Maybe it can be helpful. This is my first opinion because I don't know that much. Maybe I don't want to know that much about A.I. I just want to keep it there, just like, 'Eh. I don't know if I wanna know you.'"

LACUNA COIL's latest album, "Sleepless Empire", came out on February 14 via Century Media Records. Inspiration to create the LP came during the sessions for "Comalies XX" (2022),the acclaimed remake of LACUNA COIL's breakthrough third record "Comalies".

Last October, Italian guitarist/producer Daniele Salomone confirmed that he has joined LACUNA COIL as the replacement for the band's longtime guitarist Diego Cavallotti.

Salomone made his live debut with LACUNA COIL on August 4, 2024 at the Rockstadt Extreme Fest in Râșnov, Romania.

In June 2024, LACUNA COIL announced Cavallotti's departure. Diego, who joined LACUNA COIL in 2016, initially as a fill-in guitarist following the exit of Marco "Maus" Biazzi, later said in a social media post that "this decision is not the result of my dissatisfaction or desire to explore new opportunities."

Cavallotti and Salomone played together in the Italian metal band INVERNO, which released its debut album, "Stasis", in December 2023.