INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Making art used to be a uniquely human endeavor, but machines have learned to distill human creativity with generative AI
Whether that content counts as "art" depends on who you ask, but Spotify doesn't discriminate
A new band called The Velvet Sundown debuted on Spotify this month and has already amassed more than half a million listeners
leaned into the trend to assist with music production
However, it doesn't seem like there's an artist behind this group
In less than a month, The Velvet Sundown has released two albums on Spotify, titled "Floating On Echoes" and "Dust and Silence." A third
album is releasing in two weeks
The tracks have a classic rock vibe with a cacophony of echoey instruments and a dash of autotune
If one of these songs came up in a mix, you might not notice anything is amiss
Listen to one after another, though, and the bland muddiness exposes them as a machine creation.Some listeners began to have doubts about
The Velvet Sundown's existence over the past week, with multiple Reddit and X threads pointing out the lack of verifiable information on the
The bio lists four members, none of whom appear to exist outside of The Velvet Sundown's album listings and social media
The group's songs have been mysteriously added to a large number of user-created playlists, which has helped swell its listener base in a
When Spotify users began noticing The Velvet Sundown's apparent use of AI, the profile had around 300,000 listeners
"people" are obviously AI
We may be past the era of being able to identify AI by counting fingers, but there are plenty of weird inconsistencies in these pics
In one Instagram post, the band claims to have gotten burgers to celebrate the success of the first two albums, but there are too many
burgers and too few plates, and the food and drink are placed seemingly at random around the table
The band members themselves also have that unrealistically smooth and symmetrical look we see in AI-generated images.
