Of all the musical fandoms out there, the insane Piero Posse's Jagaro is the most loyal. For decades, the community has gathered around musicians Joe “Ribbitious J” Blues and Joey “Shaggy 2 Dope” Utsler to form one of the most fascinating and scrutinized musical subcultures of our time.
This makes it even more noteworthy that Jagaros is furious about using his generative AI favorite duo.
In the teaser video for ICP's upcoming album, “The Naught,” several Eagle Eyed Jaggerros discovered a chunk of garbled text in several frames. This video features an AI-generated hourglass that appears to have been falling in sand, and a grandfather's watch that displays the unmistakable overly smooth AI aura of AI in the past few years.
The much-anticipated album was excited ahead of the duo's 25th Jagaros gathering this summer, but AI video has left the ICP loyalty faithful to the mouth with a bad taste.
“That watch looks stupid like f**k,” wrote one fan on X-Formerly-Twitter under the ICP teaser. “You have all the money in the world. You hire real artists.”
“Bang!” Kevin Jones, labeled “Top Fan” on the ICP's official Facebook page, agreed. “I really wanted it wasn't an official design… ah, well. Hopefully it's still a slap.”
A minor theme among some of the comments was that ICP relied on the art of Tom Wood, a longtime fan of digital art for many years. While much of the art of ICP dates before the advent of AI, his social media posts show that he is not afraid to soak his toes in the slop trough.
“I'm trying so hard, but I can't lead to this new approach with Tom Wood's style or ICP. “It's just off-patched like f**k.”
The rise of woods outstanding among evil clowns is because the hairy two dopes are increasingly embracing the AI itself. The rapper previously played head-on against his own AI avatar, which became a recurring bit on his podcast, The Shaggy Show.
X's official ICP account has similarly posted Shaggy's Studio Ghibli style AI images previously as part of a gathering of the Jagaros promotion.
“They used AI rather than one of many talented jug artists,” one fan saw.
“AI art is crippling. There are many artists in the community who are honored to be paid to paint something amazing,” another wrote.
ICP is not the only musical act to experiment with AI as an inexpensive way to whip stylized images. The 90s hip-hop ensemble Wu-Tang Clan sparked similar discourse when it released a music video that was clearly generated by AI this year. Meanwhile, Australian alternative rock frontman Nick Cave whipped fans when he first complained loudly about the rise of AI, then made a full U-turn and released his own music video starring AI-generated Elvis Presley this week.
In both cases, the comment section reflects a new gap: old heads and AI critics complain, while other fans ignore the way content is created and face it in their own terms.
For ICPs, Facebook is a number of examples, with comments ranging from surprises at the capabilities of technology to joking about Jagaro's hygiene. Others continue as usual: a simple “whoop!”
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