As the technology driving artificial intelligence continues to develop at lightning speed, the impact of AI is already being seen in the world of music as AI-generated songs clutter up Spotify.
Guitarist Brian May, a founding member of iconic British rock band Queen, decided to use his band to test AI — which earned a failing grade.
Queen’s ‘The Game’
In an Instagram post, May revealed that he’d given Meta AI a simple task, asking AI to show him the album cover for the band’s 1980 LP “The Game.”
Hardly an obscure album, “The Game” was one of Queen’s most successful, responsible for such hits as “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Play the Game.”
The album cover features a black-and-white photo of all four members of the band, including late frontman Freddie Mercury, decked out in black leather motorcycle jackets, with May sporting aviator-style mirrored sunglasses.
‘Good Job, Eh?’
The image generated by AI, however, looks nothing like the actual album cover — and the band members are not even recognizable. And while Mercury looks a bit like himself, there’s something off about his depiction.
Meanwhile, Mercury and three of the other faux band members have moustaches; Mercury did sport a moustache at certain points — but not on the cover of the “The Game.”
“I just had to share this with you guys,” May wrote in the caption.
“I asked Meta AI to show me what the cover of ‘The Game’ album looked like. 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 realise WE ACTUALLY DON’T NEED AI !!!” May added. “But I’m now very serious. I believe the price we are about to pay for this ‘inevitable’ development is way too high. We must not allow these hideous Data Centres to be built in the UK. They will destroy our beautiful country, like they are already destroying beautiful America.”
He concluded with a plea to recently installed British Prime Minister Andy Burnham. “Dear Andy — you must stop it now. Before it’s too late. Bri,” he wrote.
A Side Hustle in Science
When May speaks out on AI, his viewpoint isn’t merely that of a 1970s rock star, but that of an accomplished scientist. Not only is he renowned as one of rock’s most accomplished and distinctive guitarists, he’s also Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist.
In 2007, after Mercury’s passing left the band on uncertain footing, May used the downtime to return to London’s Imperial College to complete the PhD in astrophysics that he’d abandoned three decades earlier when rock stardom beckoned.
“When I was about to finish my thesis, it was just the beginnings of Queen and I had to make that choice,” May told Time.
Completing his PhD became his next mission. “I put everything, and I mean everything, on hold for a year,” he recalled. “And they put me in a little office in Imperial College and I got down to it.”
A NASA Mission
The focus of May’s doctoral thesis was analyzing “zodiacal dust” that collects in the solar system. That unique specialization led him to NASA, where he became part of a team involved in a mission to the cosmos.
May created stereoscopic imaging for a 2020 NASA mission in which a spacecraft was sent to land on an asteroid in order to bring back rock samples. The mission was a success, with those samples successfully returned to Earth in 2023.
“This box when it is opened of material from the surface of Bennu can tell us untold secrets of the origins of the universe, the origins of our planet and the origins of life itself,” May wrote on his website.
