Luke Bryan is pushing back hard against critics of his new song “Fish Hunt Golf Drink,” after months of online ridicule escalated into claims that artificial intelligence was responsible for the track’s deliberately simple lyrics.
The 50-year-old country star addressed the controversy during a recent appearance on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast, where he made one thing especially clear: he and his collaborators wrote the song themselves. Bryan rejected claims that AI had anything to do with the creative process.
“Fish Hunt Golf Drink” was released in May as an early taste of Bryan’s upcoming album Signs, and its intentionally stripped-down writing quickly became a target online. The track centers on some of Bryan’s favorite activities, including fishing, hunting and golf, with short phrases making up much of its hook.
Some listeners joked that the simplicity sounded like something an AI program might produce. But there has been no credible evidence that AI was used. Bryan is officially credited as a songwriter alongside Chase McGill and Matt Dragstrem, and accounts of the writing process describe a conventional songwriting session.
Bryan even revealed that the basic idea began with Riley Green. While the two country singers were discussing plans to hang out, Bryan suggested they could fish, hunt, golf and drink — a phrase that eventually became the foundation of the song. Green did not co-write the finished track, but the conversation helped spark the idea.
The criticism initially appeared to amuse Bryan, and he responded on social media by arguing that the song was never supposed to be profound. His message was essentially that listeners should relax, have fun and stop analyzing every lighthearted country song as though it needed some deeper meaning.
But the reaction became more frustrating when the AI allegation began spreading as though it were established fact. Bryan said that once influential accounts repeated the claim, more people began accepting it without actually knowing how the song had been written.
He also admitted that video criticism feels particularly strange. Rather than simply reading a negative comment, Bryan described seeing people look directly into cameras and passionately explain why they dislike him or his music. Some messages, he said, have gone far beyond ordinary criticism.
During the podcast conversation, Bryan made an aggressive, profanity-filled joke about confronting particularly hostile critics in person. The exchange was said jokingly as the conversation with Von escalated, rather than as an announcement of any actual confrontation.
The controversy comes as Bryan prepares to release Signs on September 18. The project will be his ninth studio album and his first full-length record since 2024’s Mind of a Country Boy.
Meanwhile, another song from the project, “Country and She Knows It,” has been climbing country radio, providing a very different story from the online debate surrounding “Fish Hunt Golf Drink.”
Bryan does not appear interested in apologizing for making the song simple. His defense is that “Fish Hunt Golf Drink” was always intended to be a carefree track about things he enjoys — not a songwriting masterpiece. What appears to bother him far more than people disliking it is the suggestion that he did not actually write it at all.
