{"id":698127,"date":"2026-06-11T17:27:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T17:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/698127\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T17:27:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T17:27:13","slug":"bonnaroo-2026-merch-appears-to-be-ai-generated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/698127\/","title":{"rendered":"Bonnaroo 2026 Merch Appears To Be AI-Generated"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s Bonnaroo time, baby! Look at that lineup<\/a>! The Strokes! Noah Kahan! R\u00fcf\u00fcs Du Sol! Kesha Presents: Superj\u00e2m Esoter\u00edca: The Alchemy Of Pop! It’s about to be an epic weekend, one that you will surely want to commemorate with the purchase of a $45 festival T-shirt that depicts some skeletons on an acid bus! The vibes are magical! Until you find out that a computer spat those skeletons out! Allegedly!<\/p>\n

Personally, I have no idea how people tell what is and isn’t AI-generated anymore. This is a problem! I don’t want to get hoodwinked! But certain corners of the internet are abuzz with speculation that Bonnaroo, specifically, is using AI-generated imagery on its festival merch<\/a>. The Instagram account @the_aicop has pointed out a couple of examples. In the case of the skeleton bus shirt, artist Dave Van Patten shows up in the comments, making a convincing case that this particular shirt is an AI-generated rip of his cover<\/a> for Dave’s Picks Volume 24, a three-CD live collection that came out in 2017.<\/p>\n

There are other examples, too. The Bonnaroo subreddit is not happy<\/a> about it.<\/p>\n

Bonnaroo kicks off tonight with a four-act pre-show bill that’s honestly pretty sick: Skrillex, Four Tet, Vince Staples, and Spiritual Cramp. But that’s not good enough to make up for this kind of bullshit. Other festivals have used AI-generated art, and more will almost certainly do it in the future, but it sucks. The least we can do is publicly shame them for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s Bonnaroo time, baby! Look at that lineup! The Strokes! Noah Kahan! R\u00fcf\u00fcs Du Sol! Kesha Presents: Superj\u00e2m…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-698127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}