Over a million people were delighted to find a new rock band in town, initially unaware that the singers and music are AI-generated.
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We are so in the end times.
The Velvet Sundown are a rock band that exploded on Spotify seemingly out of nowhere. On June 5, they uploaded their first album, Floating on Echoes. Within only fifteen days, they released their second, Dust and Silence.
After a month, with no other music, marketing, or presence, they had over a million listeners on their hands. Which is something I can't help but think is suspicious.
Only recently, however, they revealed the AI nature of the band.
A statement about the band was posted to their
Facebook page and now makes their Spotify biography. The anonymous creators behind The Velvet Sundown are claiming that the project exists to push creative boundaries."The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence," they wrote. "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."
"Not quite human. Not quite machine. The Velvet Sundown lives somewhere in between," appears to be their tagline.
Art Without Authenticity Is A Product
Although there are clearly human minds behind this project, normalization of AI in art is a very slippery slope. Art should always be challenged, but the more AI dabbles in the process, the more genuine creatives lose out.
No longer are we then challenging art, but streamlining it.
The images that populate their Instagram page are fully generated. Those pictures would have required teams of brilliant minds to construct. Yet here they are, soulless and vapid.
If AI makes its way into the industry, real humans with real talent will be displaced. The industry loves a quick buck, and artists and creatives can be pretty expensive...
We don't know the full plans of The Velvet Sundown yet. How far their project will extend is unknown, but their current focus appears to on new music and establishing their characters further.
