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By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Most of the time, I don’t care too much about celebrity gossip. Life’s too short for me to worry about what musician wore an oh-so-wacky dress to the Met Gala or the crazy thing a movie star blurted out on the red carpet. Every now and then, though, a celebrity I really respect says something so incredibly dumb that it forever changes my view of them. Recently, this happened with one of Hollywood’s most beloved movie stars, Jeff Bridges. On Theo Von’s podcast, the Big Lebowski star just couldn’t stop talking about how cool the AI music platform Suno is.
If you don’t already know, Suno is an app that allows you to generate relatively polished music with very little effort. You can plug in custom lyrics and micromanage things like musical styles and breaks, or you can just feed it a basic prompt and let it go to town. Of course, like all AI, the app is built on stolen content; in this case, songs whose data was stolen from actual musical artists. While it would be depressing to hear any celebrity championing such technology, it’s that much more painful hearing it from Bridges, whose Big Lebowski character remains the ultimate counterculture hero in cinema.
Boomer Discovers AI
Recently, Jeff Bridges appeared on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast. There, he introduced Von to Suno, and he started out with what sounded like words of warning: “AI is, it’s frightening, man,” he said. “It’s very frightening.” Had he stopped there, all of his fans would be cheering his (admittedly very obvious) statement. Unfortunately, Bridges just kept talking, declaring that AI is “an amalgamation of all our wisdom, our soul, our things.” Digging deeper and deeper, he proceeded to play Von a song that he created for his wife using Suno.
“You can put your demos in and with your melody and your singing. And then it’ll orchestrate it and put on a vocal,” he said before hitting play. After the song, he told the podcaster, “All the guys in Nashville are using it now instead of going into the studio and paying, you know, $10,000, they can do this for nothing, man.” To his credit, Von asked the obvious question: “But do you think that holds as much value, though? Or does it even matter?” To this, Bridges disappointingly replied, “That’s the thing, it’s changing. Everything, it’s just changing, man.”
You Can’t Spell “Abides” Without AI
Obviously, Bridges offered a caveat by calling AI “frightening,” and he’s correct that everything is changing. But it’s impossible to see this clip as anything other than a glowing endorsement for AI. This is depressing on several levels. For example, Suno has an obvious appeal to those who can’t play music, the same way that ChatGPT has an obvious appeal to those who can’t actually write or draw. But Bridges is an experienced musician with a band and everything! If he wanted to write his wife a beautiful song, he could have done it himself. Now, like so many other AI cultists, he’s taking the easy way out instead of putting forth any effort.
This gets doubly depressing when you contrast Jeff Bridges’ pro-AI statements with some of his most famous characters. In The Big Lebowskihe played a counterculture icon who was a radical protestor in the ‘60s and serves as the ultimate anti-establishment slacker. Now, the real Bridges is plugging AI, which is the very embodiment of the establishment. In Tron: Legacyhe played a gifted programmer who eventually learned that flawed humanity is always better than artificial perfection. Now, Bridges is deliberately downplaying human achievement and creativity in favor of letting algorithms do all his thinking and creating for him.
Ironically enough, Jeff Bridges is now closest in spirit to Obadiah Stane, the villain he played in the first Iron Man. In that film, he sneers something at Tony Stark that Bridges is effectively sneering at musicians right now: “You really think that just because you have an idea, it belongs to you?” The answer of everyone with an ounce of actual creativity is a resounding, “yes!” Seeing Bridges sell out for no real reason other than caping for AI is one of the most disappointing sights in the world. What’s the most disappointing sight, though? Simple: the garbage comments left by AI bros who can’t even think of their own burns!
