Dr. Dre, the hip-hop producer and founder of Aftermath who also co-founded and served as CEO of Beats, says artificial intelligence deserves a place in music alongside older tools like drum machines and synthesizers — and dismissed critics of the technology.
"I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating," Dre said in a joint interview with longtime business partner Jimmy Iovine, published Sunday by the New York Times.
Dre recounted pushing back on AI skeptics in a recent conversation. "I had a discussion with a few people a few days ago," he said. "They were against AI and I'm like, 'OK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.' Or synthesizers, right? It's a new tool for creativity. Some people are afraid of learning new things."
Dre said he currently uses AI in his own work "as a tool to see what it would do with what I just did." Iovine added that producer Timbaland does the same, noting, "So is Timbaland — another brilliant producer. By the way, there's a lot of closet AI producers out there."
Asked about his most recent query to an AI chatbot, Dre kept it simple: "How do you put on muscle and lose fat at the same time? That's it."
Dre, 61, was named to Forbes' 2026 Billionaires list for the first time, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion. In 2014, he and Iovine sold Beats by Dre to Apple in a deal worth more than $3 billion. In 2023, Dre sold a collection of music income streams and other assets to Shamrock Holdings and Universal Music Group for more than $200 million.
Dre's comments arrive amid ongoing legal battles over AI in the music business. Last week, indie music publisher Round Hill Music sued Suno and Anthropic, alleging the companies illegally scraped hundreds of its songs to train AI models without permission. Suno has already been sued by all three major labels — Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music — though it settled with Warner Music Group last year. Suno has also struck a licensing agreement with BMG, which separately sued Anthropic this year over what it called "widespread and systematic infringement" involving its recordings.
Apple Music has said it will begin labeling AI-derived songs later this year, following Spotify's move to tag apparently AI-generated artist profiles as "AI Personas." Last month, a coalition including the RIAA, IFPI, the Grammys and SAG-AFTRA came together to push for an industry-wide labeling system for AI-produced songs, modeled on existing labels used to flag explicit content.
Photo: David Hwang, CC BY 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
