Iconic Rock Star Calls Out AI Music: ‘It Has No Soul To It’

Two of music’s biggest artists — from completely different generations and genres — are sounding the same alarm.

Alice Cooper says artificial intelligence is preparing to flood the music industry with artificial artists. Bad Bunny has already watched it happen. And the industry? It still seems determined to pretend this isn’t becoming a very real problem.

Speaking on SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk, Cooper warned that AI can now generate a “marketable, profitable artist” from a handful of prompts. Genre. Mood. Voice. Reference artist. Done.

But Cooper believes there is one thing the technology still cannot replicate. “It has no heart, it has no feel, has no soul to it — and that’s where it dies right there.”

Later in the interview, Cooper expanded on that thought, saying, “It’s never been in love. It’s never had its heart broken. It’s never been angry. It’s never been happy.”

That, he argues, is the difference between a song that trends and a song that people remember. The crack in a singer’s voice. The lyric written at three o’clock in the morning. The messy, imperfect emotions that come from actually living life. AI can imitate sound. It still cannot imitate experience.

Bad Bunny encountered that reality firsthand when Chilean creator Mauricio Bustos, known online as FlowGPT, used artificial intelligence to clone the voices of Bad Bunny, Justin Bieber, and Daddy Yankee into a viral track called “NostalgIA.” Millions of people streamed the song. Many listeners believed it was real.

Bad Bunny was furious. He publicly criticized the track and told fans to leave his WhatsApp channel if they enjoyed what he called “this s- -tty song that is viral on TikTok.”

The AI creator later responded publicly, offering collaboration and describing himself as a fan. But the exchange was never really about internet drama. It was a preview of the future. Nobody asked for consent. Nobody paid royalties. The algorithm simply took what it wanted.

That reality is already creating economic consequences throughout the music industry. While established artists can fight back through legal teams and public platforms, emerging artists often have far fewer protections. Independent musicians, touring performers, songwriters, producers, and young artists trying to break into the business may ultimately face the greatest disruption.

When algorithms can generate multiple songs in the time it takes a songwriter to finish a chorus, the economics begin to shift rapidly. Copyright law was never designed for this level of replication. The same technological disruption reshaping music is already transforming other industries as well. We recently explored those broader changes in our feature on Why The 2026 Job Market Is More Challenging For Gen Z.

At its core, music has never simply been content. Music is a human being standing in front of another human being and saying: this happened to me. This hurt. This mattered.