A fresh new rock band that quickly shot to Spotify’s top ranks announced that it’s actually wholly generated by artificial intelligence, just one month after its celebrated debut album earned it one million listeners.
The ’60s-inspired rock-and-roll band, the Velvet Sundown, revealed on Saturday that nothing about it is real after fans of the up-and-coming artists noticed there were virtually no traces of any people associated with it online.
Its debut album, “Floating on Echoes,” was released on June 5 to mass appeal online.
The most popular song in the album, pro-peace folk rock song “Dust on the Wind,” clinched the No. 1 spot for Spotify’s daily “Viral 50” chart in Britain, Norway and Sweden between June 29 and July 1.
All the while, the one million monthly listeners who started following the Velvet Sundown had no idea they were just listening to a mass of artificial intelligence made by fake musicians.
The photos of the band shared online and featured on the album’s cover were unnaturally smooth and matte and the guitarist’s hand was wonky with fused fingers gripping his instrument — a classic hallmark of AI-generated images.
The band’s lyrics, too, were a perfect mesh of generic anti-war sentiments and other clichés like “Nothin’ lasts forever but the earth and sky, it slips away, and all your money won’t another minute buy.”
The faux rockstars were also pumping out new albums scarily — and inhumanly — fast, releasing two in June alone and another set for mid-July.
The band finally revealed its secret over the weekend.
It updated its Spotify biography Saturday to reflect the AI twist, assuring that the project hadn’t been trying to bamboozle its audience.
“The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence. This isn’t a trick – it’s a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI,” the biography reads.
Some people who had seen through the band’s ploy early tried to take advantage of its viral success before the truth came out.
A Quebec-based web safety expert posed as a spokesperson for the Velvet Sundown under the pseudonym Andrew Frelon, which translates to hornet in French, and even slid false information to Rolling Stone magazine about his supposed clients.
But the man behind the Frelon quickly confessed that he was just trying to troll people online.
It’s unclear if the Velvet Sundown will face any backlash from Spotify or any other platforms where it may be eligible for streaming revenue.
Starting on July 15, YouTube announced that it would be cutting all monetization, including advertisements, for any content generated by AI.
In late June, popular YouTuber Mr.Beast announced a tool that would use AI to make thumbnails for videos. He quickly removed it after receiving backlash for supporting an artificial intelligence engine, which often requires massive amounts of energy that would steadily offset his years of environmental work and reforestation efforts.
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