Doom 2016 Composer Mick Gordon Says "F##k AI"

Australian composer Mick Gordon is renowned for his experimental approach to music. For 2013's Killer Instinct, he used a kangling—a Tibetan instrument traditionally made from a human femur or tibia—to craft a theme for the skeletal character Spinal using actual bones. For 2016's Doom, he famously sampled real chainsaw noises to create the distinctive guitar riffs that turned the game's soundtrack into a heavy metal masterpiece. But when asked if he'd ever consider using generative AI in his creative process, Gordon doesn't hold back. To paraphrase the late Meatloaf, Gordon will do anything to create a great soundtrack, but he won't do that.

"F##k AI," Gordon said during an interview with IGN at PAX Australia 2026.

Gordon's next work can be heard in Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2, releasing on October 14, for which he contributed another bone-shattering track for the first-person shooter's final boss fight (a taste of which is in the trailer below). He's also still hard at work on the soundtrack for Defect, the cyberpunk-themed squad-shooter being developed by a team of veterans from the Doom and Call of Duty games. Fans can rest assured that in both cases, Gordon's music comes straight from the metal-loving maestro's mind (and fingers), not from a ChatGPT prompt.

"Generative AI is always going to be behind where humans are because it's inherently trained on stuff that humans have already created," Gordon explained. "It creates a large database of what it's been trained on, and then it draws a very logical conclusion from that dataset. It's always going to be limited by its dataset, though. It's never going to be in a state where it can predict the next thing, the new thing, whatever humans can come up with. It's always going to be behind just by the nature of how these things work."

Gordon remains optimistic that audiences will always be drawn to the work of other humans, rather than machines.

"Humans are always going to want to interact with other humans. Always," said Gordon. "And I feel this AI stuff is just giving people more reason to abandon this digital infection that we have in our lives now."

"I feel that humans are always going to chase that human connection."

UK-based fans of Gordon's work will be able to make a human connection with the man himself when he takes the stage as the headline act at 2027's RADAR festival, where he is set to perform music from his Doom and Doom Eternal soundtracks live with a full band for the very first time.