Sir Brian May gives Queen fans a fright with bizarre AI tribute band

AI image generators might have largely have overcome their initial inability to depict the right number of fingers on a human hand, but it seems it still struggles to get the right number of members in Queen. Fans of the rock group had a fright this week when guitarist Brian May posted an image of what appeared to be a tribute act from an alternative digital reality.

People were soon relieved to learn that May was not sharing artwork for an upcoming collectors' edition but issuing a call to arms against AI data centres. The guitar legend said he had asked Meta AI to recreate the cover of Queen's 1980 album The Game. But The image generator, created by the same company that thinks "pervert glasses", was clearly unfamiliar with the band's synth era.

None of the random men or mustaches in the image shared on Instagram look much like Brian, Freddie Mercury, Roger Taylor, or John Deacon. For some that might be reassuring. If the image generator had replicated the album cover, we'd be talking about how it must have been trained on real album covers scraped from the internet without permission. The image suggests that it does have some visual information on what Queen were, but not enough to get it right.

“Maybe this is the time to realize WE ACTUALLY DON’T NEED AI!!!” May wrote. He went on to call for Prime Minister Andy Burnham to halt development of AI data centres that he said would "destroy our beautiful country, like they are already destroying beautiful America”.

Queen has paid a lot of attention to its visual art seriously. For the re-released Queen 1 box set, original negatives were used to recreate the sleeve photography. May has raised concerns about artificial intelligence before, warning that it raised questions about the future of creativity.

If it wasn't Brian May sharing the post, we wouldn't be talking about it. Weird AI imagery has already become so normalised on social media. But the Queen legend's plea to the world is a reminder that AI imagery still faces strong opposition on ethical and environmental grounds and that brands use it at their own risk.

There have been a bunch of other controversies this week. Warner Bros took down a promotional campaign for the sci-fi thriller The End of Oak Street that featured AI-generated talking dogs. People had criticised the ad for detracting from the film.