Aussie composer Mick Gordon is highly regarded for his experimental approach to musical composition. For 2013’s Killer Instinct he employed a kangling, a Tibetan instrument traditionally carved into a human femur or tibia, to build a theme for the skeletal Spinal character out of actual bones. For 2016’s Doom he famously sampled real chainsaw noises to pull off the unique guitar riffs that elevated the game’s soundtrack into a heavy metal masterpiece. However, when asked if he’s considered incorporating any form of generative AI into his creative process, Gordon doesn’t mince his words. To paraphrase the late Meatloaf, Gordon will do anything to create a great soundtrack, but he won’t do that.

“F##k AI,” said Gordon, during an interview with IGN at PAX Australia 2026.

Gordon can next be heard in Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 when it’s released on October 14, since he’s contributed another bone-shattering banger to score the first-person shooter’s final boss fight (which you can get a taste of in the trailer below). He’s also still hard at work on the soundtrack to Defect, the cyberpunk-themed squad-shooter that’s being developed by a team composed of veterans of the Doom and Call of Duty games. Fans can rest assured that in both instances, Gordon’s music is coming straight from the metal-loving maestro’s mind (and fingers) rather than the result of a ChatGPT prompt.

“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. “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.”

Gordon remains optimistic that audiences are always going to be drawn to the work of other humans, rather than 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.”

UK-based fans of Gordon’s work will be able to make a human connection with the man himself when he takes the stage as the headline act at 2027’s RADAR festival, where he is set to perform music from his Doom and Doom Eternal soundtracks live with a full band for the very first time.

Tristan Ogilvie is a senior video editor at IGN based in Sydney, Australia. He has 25 years of experience covering video games, having served as Deputy Editor on Official PlayStation 2 Magazine Australia and as Editor of Official Xbox 360 Magazine Australia, before joining IGN in 2009. You can find him on Bluesky @tristanogilvie.bsky.social