Billy Strings Addresses Merch AI Artwork Controversy

Guitarist Billy Strings took to Instagram today to weigh in on the controversy surrounding the merch for his recent New Year’s Eve run in New Orleans. The artist who made the artwork has been accused of using artifical intelligence to generate the imagery. Strings revealed his team has been unable to prove the images aren’t AI as of yet.

The Grammy-winning artist started by explaining the process that led to the images being used in his merchandise. “I’m pretty hands on with the art, I try to approve everything, but with everything going on and all the shows and stuff, I mean there is times where I just maybe have been a little complacent,” Strings admitted. “This is a big lesson that I’m learning. I saw these designs come through and I was kind of just like, yeah sure, why not. You know, it’s New Year’s Eve, it’s like one event, so sure, it seemed like cool enough designs to me.”

Billy Strings also liked that it was a fan who designed the art. “We have fans that make really cool art and they submit it a lot of times and we haven’t really used very much of it, but I’ve always wanted to because they make some really cool shit, cooler shit than we could even think of sometimes,” the Nashville resident stated.

Fast forward to last Friday, December 29, the day of the first show, when Strings popped online and saw the “kerfuffle” accusing the artist of using AI to create the graphics used in the merch. “I reached out to my manager and said, ‘what’s going on here?’ It’s like, ‘is this AI?’ And my manager showed me the correspondence between him and this artist, where this guy was saying that he drew it from a line drawing from a sketch, and that he thought it up in his own brain,” Strings said. The artist, Chris Patterson, told Billy’s manager he would provide the files to prove that the artwork wasn’t AI when he returned home after the shows in New Orleans.

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“From what I can tell, we don’t have what we need yet to prove that this isn’t AI,” Strings noted. “So I just want you all to know that if these t-shirts are AI, then I’m going to have to kick this dude in the pecker. And we were ripped off. I would never sign off on something like that. I, if anything, I’ve been trying to get our merch stuff to get more…hand drawn, more pencils, more painting, you know, less computer kind of generated stuff anyways.”

Billy Strings promised to provide fans an update if the artist “sends us the right files” and “clears his name.” Watch the full video below:

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