In 1977, the Sex Pistols turned God Save the Queen into an attack on authority, conformity and the institutions that determine what a society is expected to accept. Almost fifty years later, the song feels remarkably current. The figure of authority has changed, along with the mechanisms through which it exercises power.

I had the song in my head all day and asked AI to bring it into the present. I expected a parody. I gave it no particular target. Yet the generated lyrics made AI itself the subject of the protest.
The result is confusing, astonishing, and disgusting at the same time.

When asked to update a song about power and authority, AI spontaneously placed itself in the position of the institution being challenged.

Generative AI has absorbed the language of criticism, political resistance and cultural rebellion. It can reproduce their vocabulary, rhetoric and aesthetic conventions with remarkable fluency. Even dissent has become something that can be requested, generated and consumed.

“We love our algorithm / ’Cause it’s got a master plan.”
The ambiguity of the word we is unsettling. It includes the companies developing these systems, the institutions implementing them and the people who increasingly organise their lives around their outputs. We criticise algorithmic influence while allowing recommendation systems to determine which information, opinions and cultural products reach us. Our participation helps sustain the very mechanisms we question.

“While you consume the feed / Like a hallucinating sheep.”
Here, the language of AI turns against its audience. Hallucination, a term used to describe plausible but fabricated AI outputs, becomes a description of human behaviour. As synthetic material becomes increasingly convincing and abundant, the distinction between encountering information and encountering a generated approximation of it becomes harder to maintain. Familiarity, repetition and apparent credibility can begin to substitute for verification.

People adapt to the systems they use. Recommendation algorithms infer preferences from previous actions, select what is presented next and influence subsequent behaviour. Over time, the relationship becomes circular.

A system can appear to understand what people want while participating in the formation of those wants.

This gives the original Sex Pistols line, “Don't be told what you want,” a particular relevance. The question of who determines our desires has moved into systems that continuously predict, personalise and optimise the choices presented to us.
The experiment also exposes a contradiction in contemporary cultural production. AI can generate criticism of AI because criticism itself has recognisable patterns. It can imitate the anger, irreverence and refusal associated with punk while operating within the technological and commercial structures being criticised.

This creates an unusual condition for political and cultural expression. Protest can be generated through the infrastructure it challenges, distributed by systems that measure its engagement and circulated as another piece of consumable content. Its oppositional character becomes part of what makes it attractive to those systems.

How much resistance remains resistance when the system being challenged can reproduce, distribute and profit from its expression?

The machine does not need to silence its critics. It can write their songs for them.

©2026 Carolin Vedder

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