Damon Albarn has confirmed he is scoring Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming OpenAI movie. In an interview with The Needle Drop, the Gorillaz mastermind explained how working on the film contributed to his belief that AI can’t duplicate the soul of an artist’s creative journey.
“I’ve been quite involved with AI because I’ve been making a score for a movie called Artificial at the moment, which is all about the founders of ChatGPT,” Albarn stated. “So I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. Music and art should not be easy. Once it becomes easy, it’s meaningless. In a way, it’s the things you don’t see or hear that make it art. You know what I mean, in a way. It’s a weird intuition that the listener has that picks up on the journey that the artist has been through to make that particular thing with the tone of the voice, etc. You can’t replace that.”
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Albarn mentioned his scoring work while discussing the infiltration of AI into the music industry. “I think there was a foolish moment where the big corporations thought AI was going to make their life easier and more money,” he explained. “And well, that is not the case. It’s just going to… I don’t think it’s possible for AI to make soulful music.”
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He previously teased his involvement in the soundtrack in a January 2026 interview with Uncut: “I’m currently working on the score to Luca Guadagnino’s film Artificial, about [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman. I’m singing some songs and writing some electronic and orchestral backing.”
Artificial is set in the tumultuous five-day period in 2023 when Sam Altman was fired, then rehired as the CEO of the ChatGPT company. Andrew Garfield will play Altman, with Ike Barinholtz cast as Elon Musk. Written by Simon Rich, the film’s cast also includes Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, and Mark Rylance.
Albarn is stepping in after Trent Reznor composed the music for Guadagnino’s last several films: Bones and All, Challengers, Queer, and After the Hunt.
Scoring the film isn’t Albarn’s first foray outside the confines of Blur, Gorillaz, or his solo work. In addition to creating an opera based on Elizabethan scientist John Dee in 2011 and writing music for a 2015 Alice in Wonderland musical, he scored Mauritanian film director Abderrahmane Sissako’s opera Le Vol du Boli.
In 2023, Albarn told Consequence that he was working on another opera, putting German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Magic Flute Part Two to music for the first time.
Albarn is currently promoting Gorillaz’s new album, The Mountain. He and the group’s co-founder, Jamie Hewlett, sat down with Consequence for our latest cover story.
Gorillaz have set a 2026 North American headlining tour in support of the album. Tickets are currently available via KONG Card and Citi cardmember pre-sales, with the artist pre-sale starting on Friday, March 6th at 10:00 am local time. The general on-sale will then follow on Monday, March 9th at 10:00 a.m. local time via Ticketmaster.