Fender's CEO Edward Cole recently resurfaced comments from a May interview in which he characterised learning to play cover songs and collaborating with bandmates as forms of 'analog AI,' framing artificial intelligence as a natural extension of how musicians have always learned and created. His remarks come amid significant reputational damage to the company following cease-and-desist letters sent to independent guitar builders over the Stratocaster body shape, prompting influential guitarists to publicly distance themselves from Fender products.

Music industry observers and technology commentators rejected Cole's comparison as logically flawed, arguing that it conflates fundamentally different processes. Whilst musicians develop skills through selective study of existing work and synthesise original material through countless conscious and intuitive decisions informed by emotion and experience, AI models operate by ingesting massive datasets—millions of songs—and identifying statistical patterns. The analogy, critics contend, either reflects a misunderstanding of how machine learning functions or minimises the irreducible role of human creativity and intentionality in artistic production.