Indie rock band The Velvet Sundown, which currently has more than 650,000 listeners on Spotify, is causing a stir over suspicion it is completely AI-generated.
The band, whose name recalls famous bands of the past and has recently self-released its debut album Floating on Echoes, appeared a few weeks ago on Spotify where it quickly amassed a high number of listeners.
However, journalists from various newspapers have tried and failed to interview the band members, while the band has also not performed live, sparking suspicions that the band is fully AI-generated, something that the band denies on social media.
Suspicions behind the band intensified after someone who had previously claimed to be the band’s spokesperson, who goes by the name of Andrew Felon, published an article revealing he had falsely impersonated the band’s spokesperson.
In an article on Medium, Felon stated that his decision to impersonate the band’s spokesman was part of a deliberate plan to deceive the media.
The move came after Rolling Stone reported that Felon, presenting himself in an interview as the band’s spokesperson, had claimed that The Velvet Sundown’s music had been generated using an AI tool called Suno.
On Thursday, the band published a statement on X informing that “someone was attempting to hijack the identify of The Velvet Sundown by releasing unauthorised interviews, publishing unrelated photos, and creating fake profiles claiming to represent them,”
Commenting on the interviews in the media featuring a band’s spokesperson identified as Andrew Felon, the band stated: “We have no affiliation with this individual, nor any evidence to confirm their identity or existence”.
Music streaming platform Deezer claimed that it had used its AI detection tool on the band’s music, reporting that their sound was “100 per cent generated by AI”.
Gina Neff, professor at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, told the BBC that the group’s story emphasises the growing fear of losing control of AI.
“Whether this is an AI band may not seem important,” she told the BBC. “But increasingly, our collective grip on reality seems shaky. The Velvet Sundown story plays into the fears we have of losing control of AI and shows how important protecting online information is.”
Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, a non-profit organisation that certifies generative AI companies based on how ethically they source their training data, said that questions around The Velvet Sundown reflect real musicians’ concerns.
“This is exactly what artists have been worried about, it’s theft dressed up as competition,” he told the BBC. “AI companies steal artists’ work to build their products, then flood the market with knock-offs, meaning less money goes to human musicians.”
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