A "band" that sparked a heated debate for heavily relying on generative AI — and still somehow accumulating over half a million listeners on Spotify — has finally admitted the truth.
Earlier this week, a self-proclaimed "indie rock band" called The Velvet Sundown claimed on its "official" X account that it "never" used any AI, accusing "so-called 'journalists'" of "pushing the lazy, baseless theory that The Velvet Sundown is 'AI-generated' with zero evidence."
It was a preposterous claim that flew in the face of a mountain of damning evidence, from clearly AI-generated images of the band's four fictional members to a lazily-written bio that fabricated an accolade from Billboard and bore other hallmarks of having been spewed out by something like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Now, the creator of the whole thing, who's calling himself Andrew Frelon, revealed in an interview with Rolling Stone that — shocker! — The Velvet Sundown never really existed.
Frelon told the magazine that it was an "art hoax."
"It's marketing," he added. "It's trolling."
Despite facing some scorching criticism online for brazenly ripping off other people's work and undermining the livelihoods of musicians everywhere, Frelon argued that all press is good press.
"People before, they didn’t care about what we did, and now suddenly, we’re talking to Rolling Stone, so it’s like, ‘Is that wrong?'" Frelon told Rolling Stone.
"Personally, I’m interested in art hoaxes," he added. "We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real."
"And that’s messed up, but that’s the reality that we face now," Frelon said.
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