Pink Floyd’s classic 1973 album, The Dark Side Of The Moon, was basically milkshake-ducked in 48 hours this week, which is an impressive way to spend a 51st birthday. Yesterday, album closer “Eclipse” proudly rang out amongst the sick-of-Bonnie-Tyler crowd in parks and Instagram stories across the nation (for obvious reasons). Today, the band is in the news for selecting an AI-generated video as one of the ten winners of the album’s 50th-anniversary animation contest. Hello, Pink Floyd’s conscience and sense of artistic preservation... is there anybody in there?
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The offending video comes from Argentinian-Australian artist Damián Gaume, which he created for the song “Any Colour You Like.” Guame’s winning entry was one of ten videos selected—one for each of the album’s tracks—by a panel of nine judges, including Pink Floyd’s drummer, Nick Mason. “Pink Floyd has had a history of collaborating with up and coming filmmakers since our early days. In many cases, the visuals that accompany the songs have become synonymous with the music itself,” Mason said in a video introducing the challenge, which is undoubtedly true and just makes this whole thing that much more disappointing.
Independent animators and other “up and coming filmmakers” around the world are currently staring down the barrel of a gun, wondering when their services are going to be rendered officially obsolete by much more powerful artists and studios continuing to embrace the growing influence of soulless artificial intelligence. Indie horror film Late Night With The Devilintense backlash from some of those artists for their use of the anti-human technology, and now Pink Floyd is attracting the same, especially considering how many hand-crafted videos weren’t chosen by the esteemed panel of judges. (A selection of those entries, which also includes original Monty Python illustrator Terry Gilliam and The Lorax and Minions director, Kyle Balda, was compiled by Twitter/X user @skymightdie, and they’re definitely worth a watch.) While the continued proliferation of AI is unfortunately inevitable, it’s consistently frustrating to watch people with actual power to stand up for art refuse to do so.
In a behind-the-scenes look at his video, Gaume announced that the “technique that I used for creating my animation is AI.” “As a 3D artist myself, I tried to go a completely different way and try something new,” he continued, explaining that he used Stable Diffusion and Blender to create some trigger images and used prompts to “get some fresh ideas from the AI.” Actually watching the video, however, those ideas clearly aren’t that fresh at all. Not even lingering the fact that AI is always just regurgitating someone else’s work, the whole thing has the alien sheen we’ve all grown accustomed to at this point, and the guitars have way too many pickups. (That seems to be the point of the video, but it still looks stupid!)
It seems like Pink Floyd themselves might be just another brick in the wall now. You can watch Gaume’s video below. Or, you can watch a few of the winning entries that were actually created by humans instead. The full selection of winners is available on Pink Floyd’s YouTube channel.