Former Megadeth bassist David Ellefson made his position on AI-generated music clear in a new interview with Andres Violante of Rock En La Trinchera — and he’s not buying what it’s selling.
“To me, it’s just that — it’s artificial,” Ellefson said (transcribed by Blabbermouth). “And I don’t know how intelligent it really is. It’s just artificial.”
He drew a clear line between digital recording tools and AI generation proper. “Every record I make, if it’s using digital processing, it’s still our humans performing and me,” Ellefson explained. “It’s us playing. And that’s important, that it’s not just stuff taken from somewhere else, that what you’re hearing is real human performances. ‘Cause it’s the human performance that connects with the human listener.”
“That’s my problem with artificial intelligence, it’s not that intelligent, and it’s artificial,” Ellefson continued. “And that’s never gonna connect emotionally. You’ll never have an emotional connection. Humans connect emotionally, ’cause we’re animals. That’s why we connect with our cats and our dogs and our birds and our pets, because we have a beating heart, we have a pulse, there’s an emotional connection. And things that are created on a computer, they don’t have emotion to them. They may be smart, but they don’t have a heart. And it’s the heart that really connects.”
Since his exit from Megadeth in 2021, Ellefson has kept himself in near-constant motion across multiple fronts. He has continued touring and recording with Kings of Thrash, the group he formed alongside former Megadeth guitarist Jeff Young that performs early Megadeth material, and released To Hell and Back in June 2023 with death-thrash outfit Dieth.
In April 2024, he stepped in to cover for D.D. Verni during Overkill‘s Latin American tour while Verni recovered from shoulder surgery. He also launched the Ellefson-Soto project (which has two albums already released) and hosts his own podcast, The David Ellefson Show. Most recently, he joined classic heavy metal act Metal Church as their new permanent bassist in November 2025, performing on their fourteenth studio album Dead to Rights, released in April 2026.
