Wolf Hoffmann spent fifty years building ACCEPT out of hours in rehearsal rooms, and his objection to A.I.-generated music is not that it sounds bad. It is that it sounds good.
Speaking to Jorge Botas of Portugal's Metal Global, the guitarist called the technology "a necessary development, because we all knew it was gonna come one day, and here it is now" — and then spent the rest of the answer on what worries him.
"We always grew up thinking, like, art can only be made by humans. But now the lines get really blurry, mainly because the quality is just overwhelming. It's so good, some of the stuff that comes out of A.I., whether it's movies or even texts and photos, of course, artwork. Some of this stuff looks amazing, but it certainly doesn't help the idea that, 'Hey, mom and dad, I wanna be an artist,' because they're gonna say pretty soon, 'What's the point?'"
The comparison he keeps returning to is his own apprenticeship. "We started all these 50 years ago. Trying to learn a guitar was very, very difficult… we put so much effort into it, thousands and thousands of hours learning it, and then getting better, and making mistakes. And nowadays somebody can just go, 'You know what? I'm just not gonna bother with that. I'm just gonna hit a button on my laptop and I'm an artist.'"
Asked about synthetic songs climbing streaming and Billboard charts, Hoffmann followed the money to its logical end. "At what point are record labels gonna say, 'You know what? We don't need to sign any artists. We don't need to sign ACCEPT. We don't need to sign any real bands because we just generate the music and create a fake artist and sell that'?"
He sketched the mechanism precisely. A listener clicks on ACCEPT or IRON MAIDEN, the platform serves up something that sounds close enough, and nobody gets paid. "Spotify doesn't have to pay any royalties because there's no artist behind it. It's fake. So I'm sure that's gonna be a thing, if it's not already going on to a big degree."
On regulation he is not optimistic. "[The lawmakers are] just too slow. I mean, by the time they're thinking about how to deal with stuff like that, it's already all in place already. Very similar to what — you remember what happened when Napster came in. It was the same thing. It took years to find a regulation for it."
The one thing he still counts as safe is the stage. "You can't really fake live shows yet. In order to see a concert or if you wanna go see an ACCEPT concert, there's still five guys having to travel and setting up their gear and performing live in front of you. And I don't think that will ever change anytime soon, unless you get into the whole fake — what do you call it? — hologram thing. I'm sure it's gonna be here before long, but I don't think there will be an ACCEPT hologram anytime soon."
Hoffmann has tested the tools himself. He told Appetite For Distortion in 2024 that A.I. lyric generation was "scary good" — and that ACCEPT ended up using none of it.
ACCEPT's 50th-anniversary album "Teutonic Titans 1976–2026" was released on September 4 through Napalm Records, with 50 guests spread across 19 rerecorded classics.