“…what AI can't do is grow up in a terrible home. AI can't have a broken heart.” Jimmy Iovine · TBPN
Startups & Venture · September 2026
Iovine had been conceding a lot of ground — that AI will make songs easier to produce, that influencers will make records, that there was always going to be crap either way. His limit is biographical rather than technical: the thing a model cannot acquire is a life. Two turns later he put it more bluntly, saying AI is not going to be Dolly Parton.
Transcript
That's right. The prompts the prompts should get paid.
Yes.
Right? Yeah. So but there's a lot of cowboys, and they're gonna run around doing this stuff, you know, but that's not I don't think that's where the it's gonna shine. You know? Like, can people make songs, you know, easier? Can somebody who was Instagram influencer go out and make a song because they know how to dance and jump around and get people's attention? Possibly. But there's crap now. There'll be crap then, there'll be crap now. Maybe the crap will get more interesting, who knows? But as far as the great artists, you know, Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Olivia Dean, you know, some great people that are CMAT, some of these young artists that are just you know, Saint Harrison, Some of these great, great could sing Harrison. There ain't no AI that can sing like that kid. Yeah. You know? So something like that, you know, is, you know, not not gonna they're they're gonna be there. Because see, yeah, what AI can't do is grow up in a terrible home. AI can't have a broken heart.
Yeah.
You know? So, you know, AI is not gonna be Dolly Parton.
Art has always been about stories. You look at the modern art museum and there's the cost to refrain. My kid could have drawn that, but you didn't and there's not providence and there's not a journey and a story