KISS icon and business mogul Gene Simmons is sounding the alarm on the unregulated expansion of artificial intelligence. During a recent appearance on an early edition of “Balance Of Power” with Bloomberg TV Washington correspondent Joe Mathieu, the bassist argued that the current legal landscape is woefully unprepared for the AI revolution.
While Simmons acknowledges the power of the technology, he stressed that without strict oversight, the industry risks chaos.
“A.I. is a concern if left unregulated,” Simmons told Mathieu. “Anything — a beautiful horse that you just bring in, if it runs wild… You’ve got to have some parameters that we control instead of A.I.”
Simmons pointed to the current state of music charts, where AI-generated artists are already making waves, noting, “Right now, there’s a country and western star that’s got a number one record of sorts on some chart. [The artist] doesn’t actually exist.”
For Simmons, the solution isn’t a patchwork of state laws, but a comprehensive federal mandate. He argued that allowing individual states to set their own AI rules would create loopholes similar to tax havens, effectively punishing artists in stricter jurisdictions.
“The major problem here, potentially, hypothetically and otherwise, is that if states have the right, and this has to be settled right away — the government must get a federal law that encompasses all of A.I. to get some sanity out of this,” Simmons explained.
He used a corporate analogy to drive the point home:
“Because if you can do A.I. legally in Delaware, where you have all your companies so you pay less taxes… Why should they wanna do real music and real art in New York when they can just go to Delaware and do A.I.? No. You need a federal law that encompasses the entire country.”
Simmons didn’t stop at the U.S. border. He suggested that the United Nations needs to step in to prevent a global race to the bottom, comparing the potential fallout to the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs in previous decades.
“I would highly recommend, and I would hope the entire planet really gets together. It’s an issue for the UN to get a world body to accept it,” he said. “Because it’s gonna happen to the same — same thing that happened to the unions in America. You charge too much here, so we’ll do business in China. No. You want to address the A.I. issue worldwide so we can control what the rules are… Who owns the I.P.? Who’s the owner of the trademark?”
This isn’t the first time the KISS co-founder has weighed in on the intersection of technology and art. In a July 2023 interview on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” Simmons compared the current AI landscape to “playing sports without rules.”
“I am concerned about the lack of legislation… When you enter a new, let’s say a new planet… clearly there’s opportunity there… [but] without rules of the game… It’s like playing sports without rules. Who’s gonna do what?” he said at the time.
He also raised questions about copyright that remain unanswered today: “A.I. creates a song using my voice… and it sounds just like me… So when you buy it, who owns the copyright and the publishing, if A.I. did that? So, is it me, because it sounds like me? You could swear it was me.”
Despite his concerns about regulation, Simmons remains a pragmatist. When asked by Morgan if he cared about AI using his voice, he famously quipped: “We can make a deal.”
Similarly, he told TMZ last year that fighting the technology itself is futile.
“A.I. is here to stay,” Simmons said. “Technology is here to stay. And you either join in and try to adapt and try to figure out how that works with you or you’re just yesterday’s news in a very real way.”
