The long-running Punk Rock Bowling music festival made waves with a recent promotional poster that appeared to have been sloppily generated by artificial intelligence.
Somebody posted it on the subreddit r/Punk, criticizing the fest for "using s***** AI art instead of supporting [an] artist."
The poster, which at first glance looks like a hand-drawn image, can quickly be identified as AI. Between the incorrect numbers on the rotary phone to the fact that the handle itself is in two places at once, many signs indicate it was not made by a person but by a computer program.
"Not OK at all," one commenter said in disgust.
Others agreed. "Someone like PRB has the resources and should absolutely be paying a real artist to make a decent flyer," one said.
What was particularly ironic in this case was that the flyer was advertising punk — a genre of music that has defined itself as going against the grain.
"F*** generative AI. It's the antithesis of punk and DIY," one person wrote. "It removes the human element in the creative process and leaves only soulless monstrosities."
"Keep AI out of punk rock!!" another vented. "The whole beauty of punk is that it is countercultural and rejects the mainstream/corporate art world that seeks to commercialize a medium for communication that's supposed to be about emotion and humanity."
And beyond taking the artistry out of the art, one person pointed out, AI "does massive, completely unnecessary damage to the environment."
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In order to power the generative models that people use to produce images like this, enormous warehouses of computers are required to be kept running at all times. This, of course, draws a tremendous amount of resources, both to power the place and to keep it from overheating — it also generates a lot of noise.
Between that and the air pollution, people living near AI centers and crypto mining warehouses — which are very similar — are dreading the idea that AI will continue to expand.
With so much energy being powered just to create flyers like this one, many people are left wondering what the point is.
"Apparently all it takes to get people to not give a f*** is for something to be fun and convenient," one person lamented. "As an artist it's nice to see people here actually understanding the issue."
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