Mick Gordon has a gift for compression. Asked about AI, he gave the shortest possible answer: “F##k AI.” No white paper, no nuanced position on training data, no careful carve-out for “responsible use.” Two words.

Plenty of musicians have said versions of this over the past few years, and most of it has evaporated. This one sticks because of who said it and what he made. The Doom 2016 soundtrack is one of the few game scores a general audience can hum, and it got that way through methods that were genuinely strange: distorted bass pushed until it broke, hardware abused on purpose, an engine-driven system that reassembled the music while you played. The thing people love about it is precisely the part a model cannot produce, which is a person deciding to ruin a sound in a specific way and keeping the result.

Why the dismissal isn’t just posturing

Generative audio tools are very good at the median. They produce competent, inoffensive, reference-adjacent output, which makes them useful for temp tracks, ad beds, and the kind of background music nobody is meant to notice. That is a real market, and it is going to get eaten.

What they are terrible at is the thing Gordon built a career on: a sound that is wrong on purpose and becomes the identity of an entire franchise. You cannot prompt your way to “BFG Division” because the value isn’t in the notes. It’s in a decade of taste and a willingness to hand in something that makes a producer nervous.

So the blunt dismissal reads less like fear and more like a guy who knows his work sits on the side of the line the machines are worst at. The composers who should be anxious are the ones who have spent years delivering exactly what the brief asked for.

The other quote is the more interesting one

In the same stretch, Gordon said he’d return to the Doom series “in a heartbeat.” Given how his time on Doom Eternal ended, in public, in detail, with a long written account and a long written rebuttal, that is not a small thing to say out loud.

It also quietly relocates the problem. Doom: The Dark Ages shipped with different composers and a different sonic direction, and the reaction to that music was a long way from the reaction to 2016. If the most recognizable voice in the series is openly available and openly willing, the question stops being about artistic fit and becomes a question about who at id and Bethesda would have to pick up the phone. Nobody on that side has indicated they want to.

There’s a version of this where both statements are the same statement. The industry keeps looking for ways to get distinctive work without dealing with the people who make it. Gordon is an awkward, expensive, unpredictable human being who produced a soundtrack that outlived the game it was written for. He says he’d come back tomorrow.