Anthrax become the latest artists to be imitated by poor quality AI

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We’ve had AI imitating dead artists, AI imitating folk artists. Now AI have tried to pull the wool over Anthrax fans in a shape of a new album, Crazy Sheep.

Crazy Sheep turned up on the band’s Spotify page the other day, listed as a collaboration with an artist called ‘El Director’ who only has 273 monthly listeners on the platform. But one listen to the album is enough to realise that Crazy Sheep has nothing at all to do with the real Anthrax – not unless they’ve made a sudden detour into bland one-size-fits-all EDM.

There’s no comment about it from the band as yet and the album – if you can call it that, it’s only seven tracks – has been greyed out on the Spotify web page.

And as for ‘El Director’? Well this ‘individual’ has apparently released nine albums since the start of 2024, an incredible work rate for a human being and all nine have cover art that appear to be stock or AI-generated images.

But the question really is, what is Spotify doing about all of this? Their tardiness in taking down AI-generated music of existing artists, not to mention the whole Velvet Sundown controversy earlier this summer is not good PR for the platform.

In recent months, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Deerhoof have removed their music from Spotify, albeit in protest of Daniel Ek’s investment in AI military drone technology. Unless the platform starts taking the profileration of AI slop seriously, that trickle of defecting artists could easily become a stampede.