Orchestra's tone-deaf AI art provokes outrage

Daniel John
·2 min read
AI-generated orchestra ad featuring two people sitting at a concert with a lot of fingers.
AI-generated orchestra ad featuring two people sitting at a concert with a lot of fingers.

We've seen plenty of examples of egregious AI use, often involving brands trying to use the tech surreptitiously. Some AI artworks are more obviously artificially generated than others – but it's unclear quite how Queensland Symphony Orchestra expected its latest AI Facebook ad not to get accused of hitting a bum note.

"Want to do something different this weekend? Come and see an orchestra play!" The caption reads above an image featuring a couple nuzzling in the audience of a classical concern (in which the orchestra is, it seems, also part of the audience.) But if the weirdly waxy sheen doesn't give away the AI's provenance, the hands certainly do.

AI ad featuring two people sitting in a concert
AI ad featuring two people sitting in a concert

From too many fingers to no hands at all, the figures in the image bear all of the hallmarks of AI-generated characters. And the ad isn't going down well on Facebook. "This is some of the worst AI generated artwork we've seen," complains industry union the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) in its own Facebook post. "But even worse is that it comes from an arts organisation like the Queensland Symphony Orchestra that should be paying artists, not using AI. It is inappropriate, unprofessional and disrespectful to audiences and the musicians of the QSO. Creative workers and audiences deserve better from arts organisations."

The image appears to originate from Shutterstock, where it is marked as AI generated and even reveals the prompt: "two people having a date at a indoor classical music romantic concert".

And according to classical news website Slipped Disk, even the orchestra's musicians are in uproar over the image. According to the site, players were furious, but "when they raised concern s with the new Marketing Director, they were told to ‘stay in their lane’ and it’s ‘no one else's job to market".

Still, at least the orchestra can take some comfort from the fact that it isn't the only entity to have shared a botched AI image in the last few weeks – Donald Trump recently treated us to an image of him praying in church, complete with twelve fingers.