Brian May’s AI image of Queen makes the band look like they come from another dimension.
There are bigger questions surrounding AI right now, obviously. But watching it confidently butcher something as recognisable as a Queen album cover is strangely satisfying.
Brian May recently put Meta AI to a little test: show him the cover of Queen’s 1980 album The Game.
Safe to say it did not pass.
Instead of the familiar shot of Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon lined up in black leather, Meta AI spat out a deeply questionable approximation of Queen that May promptly shared to Instagram.
“I asked Meta AI to show me what the cover of THE GAME album looked like,” May wrote, before sarcastically praising the result and asking whether this was really the intelligence we wanted running things. His conclusion was fairly straightforward: maybe we don’t actually need AI.
Fair.
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It’s also worth pointing out that May wasn’t really talking about one terrible Queen picture.
The guitarist quickly moved onto the bigger issue, arguing that the environmental cost of rapidly expanding AI infrastructure is too high and taking particular aim at new data centres in the UK.
And this isn’t some new anti-AI turn for him. Back in 2023, May was already warning that AI could make it increasingly difficult to tell what had been made by people and what had been generated by machines, particularly in music and the arts.
There is something pretty funny about the whole thing, though.
Queen spent decades obsessing over sound, artwork, performance and tiny creative decisions, only for Brian May to ask one of the world’s biggest AI platforms what his own album looked like and receive something that apparently barely resembled it.
As demonstrations go, it’s about as bad as it gets.
But it is memorable.
