They’re called The Velvet Sundown.
This indie rock band splashed on the music scene this past summer with an alt-pop Crosby, Stills and Nash-like vibe—releasing two full albums in a couple weeks and amassing more than a million monthly listens on the music streaming service Spotify. Then, while eager fans were scouring the internet for live concert tickets, a secret slipped out: The band’s music, slick photos and backstory were all as fake as an email from a Nigerian prince.
You see, The Velvet Sundown is an AI construct.
Of course, these unreal rockers aren’t the first AI-generated musicians in the world. Artificial intelligence has been slipping its perfectly pert, plastic proboscis into many creative areas for some time now. But when the truth of The Velvet Sundown came out, it caused a bit of a stir for a couple of reasons.
First of those is the music industry’s consternation with AI’s participation in music. The industry maintains that the people behind an AI music group are stealing away the livelihood of real musicians in the world. Additionally, while AI is absorbing online works and lyrics to build its algorithmic models, it’s pulling from the blood, sweat and tears of very human creators—and, in effect, selling knock-offs of their work. And the real creators don’t get paid. That’s a problem.
However, the most discussed issue with The Velvet Sundown was its fan base’s disappointment. You see, The Velvet Sundown was the first AI band to convince people that actual flesh-and-blood dudes were plucking the guitar strings and writing the group’s catchy earwig tunes. Fans felt cheated when they discovered the truth. They felt tricked.
Oh, but there was more trickery to come.
Right about the time that word was slipping out that The Velvet Sundown was AI generated, a “spokesperson” for the band stepped up to talk with Rolling Stone. This individual, who called himself Andrew Frelon, said that the whole thing was an “Art Hoax” created by Suno (an AI music generator company).
Rolling Stone breathlessly ran the exclusive story … only to later realize and report that the spokesperson was himself a hoax.
This unknown individual had noticed that The Velvet Sundown had no social media presence at all. So he’d created one on X, then pretended to be the mouthpiece for that sham official account representing a fake popular band. And people gobbled it all up.
Not long after, the real representatives (?) of the fake band showed up on the real “official account” to proclaim that the group’s identity had been “hijacked.” They (he, she, it?) released a statement confirming that the group was indeed an AI creation “composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.”
Will there be more? For that matter, is everything we’ve heard in this tale true? Who knows? But this meandering fool-the-public-with-a-fake-band story certainly suggests that we’re getting closer and closer to the point where we won’t be able to tell if anything online is real.
In the face of all that, it’s a wise choice to figure out how your family will navigate their way through all types of things they might encounter online—fake bands, fake news, fake platforms. And here’s a good first step: Cultivate a critical, detective-like mindset when venturing onto the internet.
We should all wonder who created the content we’re looking at and what their motivation for it is. What do they want us to think or feel? Content posted online often relies on triggering strong emotions to get us fired up.
Wise online navigation benefits from taking a breath. Teach your family to pause and think critically before clicking on or resharing something they stumble across.
You might also explore, as a family, how social media algorithms work. Help your kids understand that the sites they visit purposely feed them content based on their past views and likes. That then creates an echo chamber-like setting where emotions run wild and you only hear one point of view. Can your teenagers verify what they’re reading, watching or hearing with other sources?
Perhaps the best piece of advice is to simply make sure that everyone in your clan feels the freedom to talk openly about things they see online that might confuse or upset them. Your home should be a safe place where open conversations can happen without judgement. Then you can sort things out together.
And if all else fails, go start a band and lie about it online.
(See? That last bit was fake.)
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