Everybody wants to fool the world: Fans rip Tears for Fears over AI art on new album cover (2025)

Published Sep 28th, 2024 6:28PM EDT

Image: Robin Platzer/IMAGES/Getty Images

Back in the day, people dogged Tears for Fears for ripping off The Beatles with songs like Sowing the Seeds of Love. So much so, that Paul McCartney himself once acknowledged during a press conference that the first time he heard the song, he thought: “Who are they kidding?”

So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that the same band now apparently seems fine with typing some dumb prompt into an AI image generator (I’m guessing “astronaut in a field of flowers”) and using the resulting soulless AI slop as the cover of their new album, Songs for a Nervous Planet. Rather than, you know, using a pittance of their considerable fortune to pay a human artist to do the work. Seriously, guys, “have you no idea how the majority feels?”

That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. Not only does the band know, but they’ve also responded to the predictable outcry with a statement that blathers on about AI being “one of the many tools used in the creative process” for the album cover, a statement that appears to have been written by an actual tool.

Tears for Fears’ social media posts announcing the highly anticipated new album, which drops on Oct. 25, have been flooded with negative comments from fans angry about everything from the lifelessness of the AI art — with its too-smooth, plastic-y feeling and lack of fine detail — to the usage of AI in general. “It’s honestly embarrassing that you’re using an ai album cover,” one user wrote on the band’s Instagram post. “You obviously have the money to pay an artist for an album cover, yet you still chose to just type in a prompt and have a computer plagiarize art instead?”

Added another: “Using AI art is such a joke. You guys are a legendary band and you chatGPT your album cover? Phone it in a little more man.”

PSA to any more beloved bands out there: If you’re going to resort to using AI for anything, at least do what The Beatles did with their new song Now and Then and steal from yourselves. Anything else, and you’ll deservedly get what’s coming to you. “I can’t wait until someone makes an all ai album by stealing your music,” another angry Tears for Fears fan wrote on the band’s Instagram. Likewise, the fan who added: “the ai cover is so lame of you guys.”

This article talks about:

AI