"Well, here's the deal, I could right now create a rock star," Alice, 78, said. "I could create a Yungblud, a guy that's really appealing, rock, tough, cool looking. I could create a guy named - I don't care - Starboy or whatever, and make him look great. He doesn't actually exist."
The rock icon went on to describe the kind of AI-generated "rock star" he could invent.
"I could tell the AI, 'I want him to sound like Tom Petty and Freddie Mercury. And here's what the album's about. Write the songs,'" he said. "Okay, now you've got a rock star that doesn't exist, and you've got an album that doesn't exist except in this world."
However, Alice - who was born Vincent Damon Furnier but legally changed his name in 1975 - pointed out there would be no original artist to claim authorship of the music.
"What happens if it sells? Who gets the money? AI wrote the songs!" he said. "That's gonna happen. You watch that happen, because the guy that just suggested what it should be did not write the songs."
Another problem, Alice said, was the fact that AI "artists" had no lived experience of human emotion.
"If I could tell it to write a song about Eddie Trunk joining The Rolling Stones, they would write you a great song - except for one thing," he declared. "The one thing it can't do - it's never been in love. It's never had its heart broken. It's never been angry. It's never been happy."
This, he said, made it next to impossible for audiences to connect with AI-generated music.
The memoir is set to be published by Ebury Spotlight on October 8, and promises to lift the lid on the huge career and the intriguing personal life of the 78-year-old rock icon.
It is the first of its kind to be shared by the singer-songwriter, and will explore how his two personas – the theatrical, elaborate rock star, and the sober pastor’s son who played him and has been married for 50 years – intertwine.
“Alice is still on tour around the world today, a proper senile delinquent playing hundreds of gigs every year, while I myself am reformed,” he said. “And with the benefit of hindsight and a certain maturity, I’d like to describe our journey to hell and back together, because it’s not only rock stars who can lose their way.”
It will also look at how the singer, real name Vincent Damon Furnier, began the group ‘Alice Cooper’ in the late ‘60s, and later went on to adopt the name as his own moniker, and later change it legally after becoming lost in the character’s identity.
“I was born Vincent Damon Furnier but, seduced by my character’s reputation, changed my name legally to Alice Cooper, and in the process lost sight of who I really was,” he added. “The mild-mannered, all-American boy I’d once been became a monster and a mortal danger to himself.”
