Brian May has said that he has “changed his mind” about AI – now he’s firmly in the anti camp.
In an interview with Absolute Radio, the Queen guitarist said that at first he thought that it was “just like the Industrial Revolution” and thus inevitable. Now he feels “we have to resist, and we have to limit its scope. We have to control it very, very seriously and very quickly.”
A large part of his antipathy is to data centres and their potentially destructive effect on the environment – May has long been something of a conservationist. “I hate the business of these data centres coming and destroying our countryside,” he continued.
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“This is a big threat, in my opinion, and it will only get bigger and bigger and bigger. The more you give, the more they’ll take, and they destroy communities. They destroy the environment. We cannot have this happening in our country. It’s already been destroying communities in America.”
“So my message to Andy Burnham is: please, this is your job now. You have to put a moratorium on these data centres right now before it’s too late.”
But that’s just one of May’s AI worries. “AI has a lot more issues than that,” he continued. “To me, there are inherent dangers in creating an intelligence which is able to possibly eventually control us. It’s a very real threat.
“Unfortunately, they will have a lot of power, though, because they will be able to — well, reverse the control, and it’s already happening. They’re already breaking out. So we’ve got to think very seriously, in my opinion.”
And it seems May’s opposition to AI may end up quashing any faint possibility of a Queen avatar show ever happening.
“Yes, we looked at it very seriously, particularly after I saw the Sphere and what The Eagles did (there), which I thought was amazing. And I spent a lot of time planning out what I thought could be a Queen show. I’ve kind of backed off now because you can’t do it without massive use of AI, with all the consequences of that.”
“Now, in some ways, I don’t wanna be stealing the work of other people,” the guitarist mused. “If you’re stealing your own work, I’m not quite sure where I stand on it, ’cause you would be stealing from the Queen oeuvre, you know, which maybe is okay because that’s ours.
“But at the same time, you’re adding to the stresses that AI is putting on the world. So, I don’t know. I’m not so keen as I was. I think it would be great to have a permanent place where people could go and feel like they’re seeing us play live in our peak, maybe all over the world, maybe at all points in time. The doors are open, but I don’t know if we’re gonna walk through.”
