Posted by 
Last year, the Waterboys released Life, Death And Dennis Hopper, 25 songs about the late Hollywood icon featuring Bruce Springsteen, Fiona Apple, Steve Earle, and more. The longstanding project of Mike Scott returned last month with a new b-sides LP containing 16 more songs about Dennis Hopper, and it had R. Crumb-ripoff AI-generated cover art. One of the singles also came with an AI-generated music video, and backlash ensued.
Then, on New Year’s Day, Scott began sharing a Chat GPT-generated rock ‘n’ roll visual history series, which of course prompted more negative feedback. The Scottish rocker has now disabled comments on his AI-generated Instagram posts, and he shared a defiant statement.
“Report On Anti-AI Police Activity” read an AI graphic posted yesterday, and it criticized anti-AI individuals for “[adopting a] judgmental position,” “[turning] into art police,” and having a “sense of entitlement to tell other artists how to act.” In the caption, Scott wrote:
We’ve disabled comments on the postings of chatgpt images because they’re getting hijacked by anti-AI PC people, almost none of whom follow the Waterboys or probably even know who we are or what the band is about or what our music sounds like. They post a kind of anti-AI spam, smug, humourless messages (almost all identical as if posted from a central anti-AI HQ or a club of campaigners). Nobody has the right to tell this band, or any band or artist, what we can or can’t do creatively, and if you try to do so you can Fuck Off. The attached image says what I think about these peoples’ comments.
He’d previously shared the graphic last month.