Luke Bryan’s ‘Fish Hunt Golf Drink’ Was Not AI-Generated, Songwriters Confirm

When Luke Bryan released “Fish Hunt Golf Drink” two weeks ago, the reaction was swift and dismissive. Comments piled up accusing the song of being AI-generated, a piece of formulaic country music built by a language model rather than any lived experience. One particularly liked remark, racking up over 30,000 endorsements, described it flatly: “Wake up, coffee, fish hunt, Chat GPT.” Bryan replied himself, writing that he was “learning that no one wants to just have fun anymore.”

The actual writers, Chase McGill and Matt Dragstrem, have now addressed the speculation. They find the accusations a bit funny, even as they defend the craft behind the track. “Drag just opened ChatGPT and…,” McGill joked before both laughed. Then he turned serious, pointing to the tangible details missing from any synthetic output. “AI has never skinned a deer on a Chevy C-10 tailgate with their uncle,” he said, referencing a line from another co-write, Morgan Wallen’s “Skoal, Chevy and Browning.”

That line gets at something bigger. Country music, especially commercial country, rearranges a familiar set of symbols—trucks, mud, whiskey, the outdoors—and the very recognizability of those symbols makes the genre an easy target for accusations of algorithmic blandness. But for McGill and Dragstrem, who have written hits for artists like Hardy and Kenny Chesney, those images are drawn from life, not scraped from datasets. Both say they have never used AI in their actual writing process, and they see the technology as a limited tool for early demo ideas, nothing more.