David Byrne says AI is 'not going to end well', after calling AI soundalike songs 'an endless nightmare'

“It’s going to make people really stupid.” That’s David Byrne on AI, in an i-D interview published on October 22, 2026.

The Talking Heads frontman didn’t stop there. “I’ve read enough science fiction. This was inevitable,” he said, “and it’s not going to end well.”

Byrne spoke to i-D around his new book, Sleeping Beauties, and the deluxe edition of his 2025 album Who Is The Sky?. Consequence picked up the quotes a day later.

What David Byrne told i-D about AI in October 2026

Byrne isn’t against all of it. “I like to think that certain aspects of AI can be used as a handy tool,” he told i-D’s Alex Frank.

AI might be good at finding a pattern in a spreadsheet, he said, and he’s read that it can help skin doctors catch the start of a melanoma. “If it’s trustworthy as a tool, that seems useful.”

The rest, he said, is “completely ridiculous and scary.” His example was school: “I’ve heard of students using it to write their papers, and then they end up with no knowledge of the thing they just wrote about.”

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They're going to think that this machine is going to do everything for us, which is part of the intention, I think.

Then came the stories about AI “breaking out of the sandbox” and “deceiving its masters,” which he said he could have predicted. He did end on hope, though. People solving problems, he said, help you realise “it’s not all gloom and doom.”

Where David Byrne draws the line on AI in music

Music didn’t come up in that i-D answer, but Byrne had already drawn his line there. Talking to WXPN host Dan Reed during his Who Is The Sky? US tour, he separated useful tools, like the technology used to separate instruments on old Beatles recordings, from AI that scrapes existing music to generate soundalike songs, per WXPN.

After hearing an AI song that sounded like “Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles mixed together,” he called it “an endless nightmare.”

His own catalogue has AI in it, on his terms. The video for “What Is The Reason For It?” with Hayley Williams, released on September 3, 2025, used AI to animate more than 20 of Byrne’s original line drawings, directed by artist Dustin Yellin, per Matador Records.

He also knows what it’s like to be early with a tool people distrust. On My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in 1981, he and Brian Eno made sampling the centre of a whole record, at a time when that approach was still pretty radical, as i-D put it.

A$AP Rocky drew a similar line a week earlier, fine with AI splitting stems so he could rap over a track, and leaving prompt-only songs to the people who make them.