Tedeschi Trucks Band: Fans’ Doubts About a Live Poster
During the weekend, the German Trucks Band played a pair of concerts at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Before the concerts, the husband-and-wife blues-rock duo shared prints on Instagram that would be available for purchase by concert-goers. But the move has sparked skepticism among the group’s fans. The post was flooded with comments accusing the band of using artificial intelligence to generate the artwork by the suspiciously credited “artist collective,” in addition to the fact that the artwork doesn’t look anything like Red Rocks.
The poster has been credited to Brilliant Workshop, an Instagram account with less than 200 followers that has only been active for two months. This is the first work Brilliant Workshop has shared on Instagram, and this is what its apparent brand director Chapin Atchison wrote when he unveiled the posters:
This contrasting diptych is a series of love letters to the majestic Red Rocks, celebrating the eternal dance between nature and sound. Visualize the unforgettable experiences and timeless memories of experiencing live music on nature’s greatest stage. Each poster tells half the story, and together they sing. From dusk till dawn, the sun and moon switch positions. The eagle and the wolf switch places in the skyline and shadows. The eager crowd waits for Derek (Trucks), Susan (Tedeschi) and the entire band to take the stage. The landscape is a silent witness, as the music comes to life where the rocks touch the sky.
AI-generated music videos have sparked controversy in the music industry, but Tedeschi and Trucks say they were unaware that the images were created with AI, if indeed they were. The band apologized yesterday. In a statement, they wrote:
Yesterday, our fan community brought to our attention that the Red Rocks poster art may have been generated by Al. We would like to express our gratitude for our fans’ concern for the creative community. In our development process, we believed we were giving an artist with a respectable portfolio in other artistic disciplines the first opportunity to create a concert poster.
We have investigated the situation and asked the artist to provide us with files describing their creative process. We have not received this information at this time and would like to apologize to the artist community who are in this unfortunate situation. We will be improving our review process in the future to prevent this from happening again. We will be donating all proceeds from last night’s and tonight’s poster sales to Access Gallery*.
*Access Gallery is an artist-run center in Vancouver, British Columbia with a mission to create conditions for provocative ideas and work in the visual arts to emerge.
If it’s AI’s work, well, it could have done better in this case!
