Jack Antonoff has never been the kind of person to quietly sip his coffee and scroll past something that offends his soul.
The man who has spent decades wrestling music out of thin air, late nights, and the kind of emotional messiness most people delete from their journals, is not about to nod politely while a piece of software steals the whole ritual.
So, when he sat down this Wednesday and typed out what he titled “Update #13” on his Instagram, he did not mince a single syllable. He called people who use AI to create art “godless whores,” told them to drive off a cliff, and meant every word of it.
And honestly, given who Jack Antonoff is, given the sheer weight of what he has built with his hands, his grief, and his relentless refusal to take shortcuts, this was never going to be a polite conversation.
The 14-time Grammy winner posted the journal entry on Wednesday, framing music-making as something almost sacred. “What we do has become an ancient ritual,” he wrote. “You don’t have to write music, you don’t have to record it, and you don’t have to bring out the band and play it. And yet for us, the idea of optimizing what we do is a complete miss of the entire point of what compels us in the first place.”
He made it clear this was not just his personal hang-up. He said that himself, his band, and everyone he knows have “never been looking for this work to become quicker or easier” and were “never frustrated by the randomness and magic it takes.”
He called that exact randomness, that madness, the entire reason they do it. Strip the process away, he argued, and what you have left is pure nothingness.
The Man Who Called It Nothingness Has the Receipts
It would be easy to dismiss a rant like this as a rock star throwing a tantrum in his feelings. But context matters enormously here, and Antonoff’s context is overwhelming.
He has famously collaborated regularly with Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, and others, and is considered one of the most prolific pop producers of his generation.
His credits include co-writing and producing Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-winning GNX, as well as collaborations with Sabrina Carpenter on Short n’ Sweet, Gracie Abrams, and Paramore.
This is not a man who has been coasting. This is someone who has been inside the actual fire of creative work repeatedly, at the highest level, and when he says the process is everything, he speaks from a place most people will never stand.
And this is not new territory for him either. Back in 2023, as AI’s rise in the arts became more apparent, Antonoff told Music Business Worldwide that he did not care what AI would do to the art itself, because he did not believe it would.
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His real concern was commerce. “I think it’ll mess up the commerce for a lot of struggling artists,” he said. “This is the problem with the business side of things; they can often figure out a way to ‘disrupt’ or break something, but what they can’t seem to ever figure out is, it was never broken.” He was right then, and this week he decided it was time to say the quiet part loudly.
In his Instagram post, Antonoff wrote: “So to everyone who is gassed up about the new ways you can fake making art, by all means drive right off that cliff. We’re genuinely happy to see you go.”
He added: “Generations coming will be engaging in the ancient ritual of writing, recording and performing as it comes to us from God.” He called the idea of optimizing that holy process the most embarrassing thing he could think of.
A Man Mid-Album, Mid-Renaissance, and Fully Out of Patience
What makes this particular eruption land differently is the timing. Antonoff is not in some quiet period of his career where a rant like this would read as bitterness from someone watching the world pass him by. Bleachers’ fifth studio album, Everyone for Ten Minutes, drops on May 22, 2026.
The New York Times has described it as “anthemic, life-affirming pop rock.” He has been positioning the album as a project about “communication and how people interact with each other.”
The Instagram post was headlined “Only my people can see me,” a lyrical motif pulled directly from the new album. So this is not a man raging into the void.
This is a man at the peak of his creative life, releasing something deeply personal, and drawing a very clear line in the sand about what kind of world he wants that work to land in.
In a Paste interview published just a day earlier, he reflected on this exact duality. He acknowledged what he called the “destruction” of the artist community, but added that “from a heart-and-soul point of view, I feel like there’s this amazing renaissance in me and the people I know.” He is not hopeless. He is fired up. And those are two very different things.
The Rather Unpleasant Angle Somebody Has to Look
Here is where it gets genuinely complicated. Jack Antonoff is right about everything that matters, and yet the very passion driving his argument could be its blind spot.
When he says that music is an ancient ritual and that, without the process, there is “nothingness,” he speaks as someone for whom that process has been a gift, not a barrier. He had access to instruments, studios, mentors, and a path.
The question worth sitting with is what happens to the kid in a bedroom with no gear, no budget, no band, and a genuinely brilliant musical idea that has no vehicle without tools that lower the barrier to entry. AI, for all the slop it generates, has also handed a microphone to people who would otherwise never have been heard.
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That does not make Antonoff wrong about the “godless whore” category, the people rushing to replace human creativity wholesale with generated content for clicks, streams, and cash. Those people exist, and they are doing real damage to the ecosystem he describes.
But the conversation is worth having with some nuance, because the ancient ritual he is defending has historically also had a very strict guest list. The real question is not whether the process matters. It absolutely does.
The question is whether the gatekeeping of that process has always served the art, or just the people already inside the room. Antonoff, to his credit, seems to genuinely believe in the sacredness of the work itself. But sacredness, historically, has also been used to keep people out.
None of that changes the fact that Wednesday’s post was electric. It was honest, it was raw, and it was written by someone who clearly believes in what he does with his whole chest. That, at minimum, is exactly the kind of thing AI cannot fake.