The metal-loving maestro clearly has no plans to incorporate generative AI into his creative process.
Aussie composer Mick Gordon is widely celebrated across the video game industry and the broader music community for his fiercely experimental, hands-on approach to musical composition. Rather than relying solely on conventional synthesizers and digital audio workstations, Gordon has built a reputation for hunting down bizarre, organic sounds to forge his signature industrial soundscapes.
For 2013’s Killer Instinct, he famously employed a kangling—a traditional Tibetan ritual instrument carved from a human femur or tibia—to build an authentic, bone-chilling theme for the skeletal character Spinal out of actual human remains. A few years later, for id Software’s critically acclaimed 2016 reboot of Doom, Gordon famously sampled real chainsaw noises, manipulating the grinding mechanical roars to pull off the unique, aggressive guitar riffs that elevated the game’s high-octane soundtrack into a modern heavy metal masterpiece.
Given his history of boundary-pushing audio engineering and unorthodox creative methods, one might wonder if he has ever experimented with emerging digital tools like machine learning. However, when asked if he’s considered incorporating any form of generative artificial intelligence into his creative workflow, Gordon doesn’t mince his words. To paraphrase the late, great Meatloaf, Gordon will do anything to create a great soundtrack, but he won’t do that.
"F##k AI," said Gordon bluntly, addressing the topic during an exclusive interview with IGN at PAX Australia 2026.
Gordon’s uncompromising stance is backed by a relentless output of fresh, human-crafted material. Fans can next hear his work in Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 when the intense retro-style first-person shooter is released on October 14. Gordon has contributed another bone-shattering banger to score the game’s final boss fight, giving players a taste of his signature sonic devastation, which can already be previewed in the official game trailer.
Beyond slaughtering heretics in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, the composer is also still hard at work on the soundtrack to Defect, an upcoming cyberpunk-themed squad-shooter currently being developed by a talented team composed of industry veterans who previously worked on the Doom and Call of Duty franchises. Fans of industrial and heavy metal music can rest assured that in both instances, Gordon’s thunderous music is coming straight from the composer’s own mind and fingers, rather than being manufactured by a generic ChatGPT prompt or automated algorithm.
Elaborating on his disdain for machine learning models in the arts, Gordon pointed out what he views as an inescapable fundamental flaw at the heart of all generative technology: its inability to truly innovate.
"Generative AI is always going to be behind where humans are because it’s going to be inherently trained off stuff that humans have already created," explained Gordon during his PAX Australia appearance. "It creates a large database of what [it’s] been trained on, and then it draws a very logical conclusion on whatever that dataset is. It’s always going to be limited by its dataset, though. It’s never going to be in a state where it’s going to 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 the way that these things work."
Despite the massive corporate push toward automated content creation across various entertainment sectors, Gordon remains firmly optimistic that audiences will ultimately reject synthetic shortcuts. He believes that listeners and gamers are always going to be drawn to the genuine, flawed, and deeply emotional work of other living humans, rather than soulless calculations generated by 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 with our lives now."
"I feel that humans are always going to chase that human connection."
That pursuit of authentic human connection will soon take physical form on a massive international stage. UK-based fans of Gordon’s heavy metal compositions will soon have the rare opportunity to make a direct, tangible human connection with the man himself. The composer is scheduled to take the stage as the headline act at 2027’s RADAR festival, marking a monumental milestone in his career. At the festival, Gordon is set to perform music from his iconic Doom and Doom Eternal soundtracks live with a full band for the very first time, bringing his legendary virtual carnage roaring into the real world.
