Psychedelic UK rock band Pink Floyd is one of the most beloved and popular music groups of all-time, with its songs played consistently on classic rock radio stations, and fans and listeners spanning multiple generations.
But the group recently stepped into the middle of the ongoing and increasingly fierce debate over AI generated visuals by choosing a fan-made video created using the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion as one of the winners of an open animation competition it held online to celebrate the 50th anniversary the band's seminal album "Dark Side of the Moon."
As such, the AI video for the song "Any Colour You Like" won one of the £10,000 (approximately $12,656 USD) prizes and is eligible for a bonus prize of up to £100,000 ($126,563), a sentiment that did not sit well with other web users. You can watch the video embedded below, which shows a collection of psychedelic scenes moving between outer space and close-ups of instruments such as guitar and drums, merged with spacecraft.
Pink Floyd's announcement last Friday, April 5, from its account on the social platform X that an AI-generated video won at least one of its multitude of cash prizes sparked an immediate, intense backlash and criticism from other X users, including other self-declared participants in the competition.
"Saw the gorgeous hand animated submissions you picked over this generated AI slop," wrote one X user. "Whoever managed this competition should be fired immediately. Absolutely embarrassing for you, what a fucking disappointment."
"i spent two years and about 1500 USD to produce The Sky Below," wrote another user. "Every scene was painstakingly fabricated by hand. so far it’s made almost $90. this guy typed 'cool guitar planet video' in a plagiarism machine and won TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS."
Another user said that they helped their boyfriend who worked for "more than half a year" on a submission video that was not chosen as a winner, and "literally no words to describe how mad and upset I am."
How Pink Floyd's AI music video for 'Any Colour You Like' came to be
The offending video for the song "Any Colour You Like" was created by independent 3D/CGI artist Damian Gaume, one of more than 900 submissions by fans from around the world collected during the competition's submission period last year, as the outlet Live for Live Music reported.
The competition invited fans and artists from around the world to submit new animated interpretations of any of the 10 songs on the Dark Side of the Moon album, and participants could create up to 10 submissions each (one per song).
The original Dark Side of the Moon album is already a kind of proto-meme, as rock fans and drug users (a frequently overlapping Venn diagram) have long recommended one another play the music in time with the movie The Wizard of Oz because of how well it seemingly syncs up.
Another Pink Floyd album, The Wall, was also made into an acclaimed surrealist animated film in 1982, directed by Alan Parker, written by Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, and animation direction by Gerald Scarfe. So, the idea of hosting a crowdsourced animation competition is in keeping with the band's long history.
As Pink Floyd wrote on their competition website, "Pink Floyd have a rich history of collaborating with animators from the beginnings of the band (Ian Emes, Gerald Scarfe, etc.), and in some cases the visuals that accompany the songs have become synonymous with the music itself. The band gave all animators an opportunity to present a fresh take on these timeless aural works."
For his part, Gaume, who appeared in a "behind-the-scenes" video posted by Pink Floyd on its X and YouTube accounts, explained that "the technique I use for creating my animation is AI...I tried to go in a completely different way and try something new."
Gaume, who operates under the name "Marble Mannequin," is an Argentinian artist based in Australia who has previously created work for large international brands including BMW, Zara, Universal Music, Dior and Lenovo.
For the Floyd video, he said he used "Stable Diffusion installed locally," training his own varants of the open-source AI model on 3D assets he made in the software Blender. "It was a lot of fun and now I'm getting into it and creating more and more AI."
He said he was inspired by his childhood memories of listening to Dark Side of the Moon played for him by his father, and by the iconic artwork on the album's cover of a ray of light entering a prism and breaking into a rainbow, created by UK design firm Hipgnosis.
Even as dozens of users rushed to criticize Gaume's video, others spoke up in defense of it, including X's crowdsourced "community notes" feature, which began tagging tweets containing rival videos noting that they were submitted for entirely different song where traditional animation competitors won.
Indeed, of the eight winners in the competition announced so far, only one, Gaume's appears to be made primarily using AI.
VentureBeat contacted Gaume through several accounts to get more information on his process and reaction to the backlash on social media, and will update when we hear back.
As for those who selected the video, the judges in Pink Floyd's 50th anniversary competition included Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell of Hipgnosis (one of the original Dark Side of the Moon album cover designers) and Scarfe (The Wall animator), as well as Monty Python animator and director Terry Gilliam, among a murder's row of other leading animation directors, artists, and creatives.
In other words — it wasn't just no-name hacks or functionaries judging the entries: these are among the most esteemed names in the entire medium of animation.
What it means for those seeking to use AI imagery in creative and commercial projects
The controversy surrounding the use of AI in the creative arts shows no signs of abating anytime soon.
While Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI and other AI image generator companies including Midjourney face lawsuits over scraping publicly posted, copyrighted works of human artists without permission to train AI models, the companies continue to offer their software and users continue to use them for all sorts of purposes, creative and commercial.
Ye (formerly Kanye West), Madonna, 30 Seconds to Mars (fronted by Jared Leto), Nicki Minaj, and now Pink Floyd are among the mainstream artists who have deployed AI visuals to promote or accompany their music.
Yet Minaj was among the more than 200 artists who recently signed a joint statement calling for protections against "the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem."
AI imagery has also shown up in the latest season of HBO series True Detective and indie movie Late Night With the Devil, both cultivating similar pushback from observers online. Prior to that, The People's Joker and Everything, Everywhere All at Once also used AI for filmmaking, but have not received a comparable vocal backlash.
Yet this latest fracas with Pink Floyd shows that even as AI continues to permeate the creative arts and business world, some users continue to bristle at its use, training methods, and perceived quality (or lack thereof), and remain staunchly resistant to it wherever they can detect it. Those seeking to invite the use of AI in competitions or in their creative works would do well to keep this in mind and be prepared for criticism, no matter how artful or acclaimed their results.