Mysterious Band The Velvet Sundown Sparks AI Music Debate

A music group called The Velvet Sundown has had its songs streamed hundreds of thousands of times on Spotify since their debut a few weeks ago - without it being clear what it actually is, CE Report quotes Kosova Press.

The group has a verified page on the music streaming platform, with over 850,000 monthly listeners, the BBC reports.

However, none of the four musicians named in the group have given any interviews or have known social media accounts, and there are no recordings of any live performances.

This has prompted accusations that they and their music are generated by artificial intelligence (AI) – something the band denies on social media.

The group did not respond to the BBC's request for an interview.

Making the situation even more confusing, Rolling Stone US reported that the band's spokesperson had admitted that The Velvet Sundown's music was generated using an AI tool called Suno – only for the magazine to report shortly afterwards that the spokesperson himself was a fraud.

The man, who uses the name Andrew Frelon, said it was all a deliberate plot to deceive the media.

A statement on the band's Spotify page says the band "has no connection to this individual, nor any evidence confirming their identity or existence."

The account on X that claims to be the group's official channel is also fake, it further states.

Professor Gina Neff, from the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, says this raises a problem that goes beyond a single group.

“Whether or not this is an AI-generated group may not seem important,” she told me.

"But increasingly, our collective sense of reality seems shaky. The story of The Velvet Sundown feeds our fears about losing control over AI and shows how important it is to protect information online."