Slipknot’s Clown Defends AI While the Planet Burns

In a recent interview, Shawn “Clown” Crahan of Slipknot talked about using artificial intelligence as part of his creative process. He called it “a professor in my pocket.” He bragged about using it “190 percent.” He described feeding his own poetry into algorithms to generate musical ideas and framed AI as a cheaper substitute for a human producer.

As an artist, and honestly just as a human who values the creative work of others, hearing that made my stomach drop. Not because experimentation is bad, but because of what that language reveals. It reduces creation to efficiency. It treats art like something disposable, something that can be optimized, outsourced, or replaced. For people who create because it’s part of how we exist in the world, that framing doesn’t feel abstract. It feels like a warning.

I draw. I paint. I sing. I write. I’m also a journalist. I’m autistic, and I cannot exist without creating. Even when no one sees it, even when it never leaves my room, I still have to make things. Creation is how I regulate, how I process the world, how I stay grounded in my own body. I cannot imagine handing that over to a machine. I'm so grateful for the gift of creation.

My art is not separate from me. It carries my energy, my nervous system, my lived experience. Every piece holds something of my spirit, whether I intend it to or not. That’s what art is. An imprint. And I don’t believe for a second that something scraped together from the stolen work of countless other artists, filtered through an algorithm designed to maximize profit, carries anything but emptiness. I don’t want my work absorbed into that slop. I don’t want my voice flattened, mined, or repurposed by a system that treats creativity as raw material.

AI doesn’t create. It extracts. It relies on the unpaid labor of real artists who never consented to have their work used this way. It consumes enormous amounts of energy while accelerating environmental harm. It floods culture with content that looks like art but feels hollow because it is hollow. Calling that progress feels like a slap in the face to anyone who has ever struggled, doubted themselves, or pushed through fear just to make something honest.

What makes all of this even more frightening is the moment we’re living in.

AI is being normalized at the same time Donald Trump and his movement are openly attacking education itself. Trump has repeatedly called for dismantling the Department of Education, defunding public schools, and tightening control over what children are allowed to learn. His political world thrives on anti-intellectualism, disinformation, and the erosion of critical thinking. A population that can’t read, write, or think independently is easier to manipulate.

At the same time, Trump is deeply connected to billionaires and tech elites who are heavily invested in AI. These are the people who stand to profit from a future where teachers, artists, writers, and thinkers are replaced by software. Where children are raised on algorithm-driven content instead of being taught how to imagine. Where creativity becomes automated and human expression becomes optional.

That overlap isn’t accidental. It’s strategic.

Children are already being raised on brain-rotting, algorithmic content designed to keep them distracted and emotionally numb. Now we’re being told that art itself can be outsourced, that struggle is inefficient, that imagination is something a machine can do better. This is what cultural control looks like when it’s dressed up as innovation.

Slipknot, although quite mainstream, has built its legacy on rage, free expression, alienation, and resistance to dehumanizing systems. That history makes this moment especially painful. When artists with influence normalize these tools, they help usher in a future where human creativity is treated as disposable. Where the thing that once helped people survive, not just financially, becomes another resource to be extracted.

Capitalism has always been a system designed by the ruling class to extract as much as possible from the middle class, working class and the poor, our labor, our bodies, our time. Now they’re going after something even more personal, our imagination. AI isn’t being pushed on creatives to liberate or empower us, it’s being pushed to centralize control, cut humans out of the creative process, and convert expression itself into a resource they can extract.

There are things humans must do for ourselves because they are fundamental to being human, not because they’re efficient or profitable. We need to think, learn, create, and imagine with our own minds, our own hands, and our own imperfect perspectives. Art is one of those things. Education is another. If we surrender them, especially now, we don’t just lose skills or careers. We lose the ability to think independently, to imagine alternatives, and to challenge the systems that benefit from keeping us down.

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