Brian May has been warning about the dangers of AI for years, going back to his 2023 interview with Guitar Player when he warned, “I think we might look back on 2023 as the last year when humans really dominated the music scene.”
Now May has revealed an AI version of a Queen album cover to argue his case that humans don’t need the emerging technology.
The guitarist prompted a large language model platform to generate the cover image of 1980’s The Game — which featured the hit “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” — and what he got back urged him to restate his position.
“I asked Meta AI to show me what the cover of The Game album looked like,” May posted on Instagram. “This is what it gave me. Good job, eh?” He continued: “So this is the kind of intelligence that will soon be ruling the world? Well, great. Maybe this is the time to realize we actually don’t need AI!”
He turned fully serious as he addressed current plans to build AI service centers around the U.K., despite local community concerns over the establishments’ energy and water consumption. “I believe the price we are about to pay for this ‘inevitable’ development is way too high,” he said.
“We must not allow these hideous data centers to be built. They will destroy our beautiful country — like they are already destroying beautiful America.”
The electric guitar hero finished with a message to new British prime minister Andy Burnham, whose honeymoon period has been attracting calls for major political turnarounds. “Dear Andy — you must stop it now. Before it’s too late,“ May said.
Meanwhile, Spotify announced plans to badge music created by AI, to make users better aware of what they’re hearing. “Spotify is rolling out the ability to label artists as being an ‘AI Persona,’” the streaming platform said via X.
“The label can only be applied by creators themselves, or by Spotify if [we] detect an artist to be AI-generated. Artists labelled as an AI Persona will be excluded from personalised recommendations.”
The move follows the huge increase in tracks created via large language modelling systems. Rival platform Deezer recently confirmed that over 50 percent of daily uploads were non-human compositions. An earlier study suggested that 97 percent of listeners can’t tell the difference between a “real” composition and one created using AI.
