BALTIMORE — Local death metal band Infested Remains landed in hot water after fans criticized the AI-generated corpse on their latest album’s artwork for looking “weird” and “anatomically incorrect,” disappointed sources confirmed.
“Listen, I understand the ethics of not being allowed to use real human corpses, but surely they could have used dead birds or something to avoid lawsuits from anyone’s estate,” former fan Samantha Garcia said while showcasing a slideshow of dead crow photos on her phone. “I say that as someone who actually likes how the body’s wonky extra fingers form the Infested Remains logo. Some guy who got exposed to radiation probably spent his entire short, painful life waiting for that moment just for a computer to take it from him.”
Infested Remains frontman Justin Grimshaw insisted the artwork’s appearance was intentional and completely unrelated to his refusal to pay a real artist for their work.
“We actually looked at a few human artists before landing on AI, but none of their portfolios were nasty enough to get our fans banned from the airport,” Grimshaw said as he ironed the album cover onto a T-shirt. “The extra fingers won us over as soon as our bassist started going off about how freaky they were. We ended up adding even more fingers to the prompt and got what I think could be our ‘Dawn of the Black Hearts.’ Seriously, it looks like part of the background was scraped from that.”
Technology expert Collin Rodney suggested the situation could lead to even more horrifying album artwork in the future.
“Before AI, you could only have one corpse on your album artwork. Now you can have a whole bunch of them Frankensteined into a never-before-seen monstrosity with a weirdly distorted face,” Rodney said while avoiding eye contact with the design. “It makes me wonder if artificially generated horrors will outdo manmade horrors as people continue to generate images. I hope they at least make the programs smarter, because those hands freak me out.”
At press time, members of Infested Remains were seen adding “firework victim” to the prompt for their next EP’s artwork in hopes of getting a design with a normal amount of fingers.