King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard To Release 11 Albums In 2023 With Help From AI [Photos]

Australia’s eclectic psych-rock favorites King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are among the many musicians trying their hands at creating music with the assistance of artificial intelligence. On Friday, the band announced a series of 11 new concept albums due in 2023—all of which were crafted in collaboration with AI.

Artificial-intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT are quickly making their way into countless industries, from copywriting to employment recruiting to education and everything in between. In January, just a few months after its initial launch, Reuters reported that ChatGPT had 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.

While many people have voiced concerns about this new technology replacing their vocation, experts are optimistic about what humans can achieve when working in concert with AI. According to Erik Brynjolfsson, the director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, “I like to use ‘affected’ not ‘replaced,’ because I think if done right, it’s not going to be AI replacing lawyers, it’s going to be lawyers working with AI replacing lawyers who don’t work with AI.”

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard surely don’t need any artificial help in the songwriting department. They have released released 23 studio albums, 14 live albums, three compilations and three EPs since forming in 2010, and have issued five-plus albums in a calendar year on multiple occasions. But frontman Stu Mackenzie explained in an Instagram post that he saw the technology less as a crutch and more as a key to unlocking the band’s full creative potential.

“I’ve always had too many ideas. I’m always scrambling,” he said. “My brain just churns them out faster than I can execute them in the physical realm, so I’ve been playing around with delegating some of my ideas to ChatGPT. It’s like, I had this idea for an album of 12-bar blues tunes about Godzilla called DinoBummer, but I was already busy with another project, so I was like, ‘Great, I’ll let the AI handle the DinoBummer lyrics while I finish Piccolonium, our flute covers EP, and we can release both as a double-album. Weeww!”

I pledge allegiance to our A.I. overload

— King Gizzard (@kinggizzard) October 20, 2020

“We’re just gonna keep pumping them out, see what sticks, and see how the AI responses change over time. I hope the AI eventually goes all dark and murder-y like it did in that New York Times article,” he added. “That could produce some really cool, moody lyrics for the Nordic death-folk album we have on the schedule for the third week of July, Exercising in Khakis.”

The process has already borne some unexpected fruit for King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. As Mackenzie explained, the first release from the series was the result of a typo. “I was trying to tell the AI to write some lyrics for this space-polka LP, Weird in Space, but I accidentally typed ‘Weir in Space’ and it gave me, like, astronaut-themed versions of songs by Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead, so I just went with it. But then I got thirsty, so I came up with a whole companion album called Beer in Space. Those two come out in May.”

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s 11 new albums—Crystal Scissors, Piccolonium, Exercising in Khakis, DinoBummer, Weir in Space, Beer in Space, A Flower Blooms in Tibet, Detonating the ‘Nanas, Apocalypse Charcoal, Unspooling the Hose of Time, and Magnetized Monkey Pie—will arrive throughout 2023 via Flightless Records. Scroll through the AI-generated covers of the 11 upcoming King Gizzard albums below to get a taste of what’s to come.

Crystal Scissors – King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard