Bring Me the Horizon Catches Flak for Using AI-Generated Visuals in Live Shows
As the debates over artificial intelligence (AI) start to heat up, a lot of people are developing scorched-earth policies towards the technology and basically cancelling anyone who even uses it. Particularly in the case of AI art, many complain that AI learns from real artists and, thus, steals their work and labor. Furthermore, every time someone uses AI art, it means an actual artist that could have done the work for them instead doesn’t get hired. That’s a lot of the rhetoric that’s going down now on social media following Bring Me the Horizon’s recent use of AI in their live visuals.
Back on December 1, an account called “Bring Me The Horizon Middle East/North Africa Fans” on the popular social media site that I will always continue to call Twitter posted a video of the band’s performance in São Paulo, Brazil which featured AI generated visuals in which frontman Oli Sykes turned into some sort of demon. The account called the visuals “sick” and asked at the end of the post if fans liked the AI visuals, and boy did fans not like them at all.
Lots of comments mocked the account for calling the visuals sick, such as user @Mega_Nova_ who said:
“Yeah, these visuals look sick. As in, they make me want to throw up.”
But while some fans expressed aesthetic complaints, others expressed moral complaints, such as @Hollowed_Artist who wrote:
“No. Feels like a slap in the face for the super talented artists who have worked with them.”
To make matters worse, Bring Me the Horizon made the incredibly misguided move of bragging about their AI-generated images by posting a video of the images on TikTok a few days ago, and many of the comments were along the same lines, such as user pawsten who wrote:
“using A.I? are you serious.”
Or user yaoibotomy who wrote:
“i defend yall with my life but ☹️”
Whether or not you agree with the scorched earth policy towards AI and anyone who uses it, it seems pretty oblivious for the band to brag about something on TikTok that people were already criticizing them for on Twitter. Whether or not they continue to fuck around with AI after these criticisms will remain to be seen.
