U2

Formed in Dublin in 1976 — Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr. — U2 grew from post-punk upstarts into one of the biggest bands in history, with 22 Grammys and a forty-year habit of chasing the technological edge of live music, from Zoo TV’s wall of screens to the PopMart LED arch.

Generative AI on the biggest screen on Earth

That habit made them the natural choice to open the Las Vegas Sphere. U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere launched the $2.3 billion venue in September 2023 and ran 40 shows into March 2024 — and its visual centerpieces included “King Size,” a kaleidoscopic Elvis Presley collage by video artist Marco Brambilla, screened during “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” Brambilla built it with generative AI: he trained Stable Diffusion to categorize his library of more than 12,000 film clips, then used it alongside DALL-E and Midjourney to conjure “fantastical exaggerations” of Presley, developing the piece’s themes — the death of Elvis, the birth of Las Vegas — in conversations with Bono.

The band’s guitarist has gone further than commissioning AI art — he has tried the tools himself. In a 2024 Record Collector interview, the Edge revealed he had been experimenting with AI composition, and delivered a working musician’s verdict: no prompt could produce a U2 track, because the band’s sound is not a genre a model can average its way into. It was skepticism earned through use rather than protest — U2 has signed no anti-AI letters and filed no lawsuits.

The result is one of the more instructive AI postures in rock: embrace the technology as spectacle and experiment, while betting the band’s identity that human specificity still cannot be generated. Brambilla himself described AI on the project as “a blunt instrument that helps you get references and inspirations,” with intention remaining the artists’ department.