Rob Reacts: The Velvet Sundown

So I don’t know exactly how new this is; especially considering that I seem to be a little bit behind the curve when it comes to technology. But yesterday on Instagram, I saw a story about a band who currently has over 400,000 followers on Spotify. Many Reddit users believe The Velvet Sundown to be entirely created by AI – artificial intelligence.

I did a a little more research on the group, and what I have found so far is that neither the band or any of the “members“ of the band have any social media accounts beyond Spotify. At least until yesterday…

This Stereogum article sheds a little more light on The Velvet Sundown. I was surprised to learn, per this article, that at the velvet sundown is not the only AI act in mainstream music. Timbaland is working on “signing” AI acts as well. Likewise, I was surprised to realize that Spotify does not allow music that is created by bots, which The Velvet Sundown certainly seems to have been.

This of course, raise some very fascinating questions: first and foremost, is the velvet sundown and entirely AI created music act? is artificial intelligence capable of writing, original music and lyrics? Is AI capable of creating said songs and singing voices? And what does this say of Spotify? Will they start promoting fake bands as opposed to establish bands like Led Zeppelin or Greta Van Fleet?

The strangest thing about this group, and granted, I have only listened to one song, is that the music is actually pretty good I don’t mind it for what it is: it’s entertainment. Obviously there would be no way that an AI created musical act could ever hold the concerts or attend award ceremonies or anything. But if I’m just looking for music to listen to while I’m driving or hanging out, AI-generated music doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

Here is a link to the velvet sundown‘s Spotify page

The bigger question, as I mentioned earlier is if streaming platforms like Spotify will start promoting AI bands, instead of “real “musicians. With CD sales being practically nonexistent, musicians make a portion of their income (albeit a small portion) through digital downloads and streaming plays. Still, pushing AI created music over actual musicians work is just one more means of making it harder for musicians to make a living. If acts like the velvet sundown are in fact, conceived by streaming platforms, like Spotify and treated solely using artificial intelligence, what’s to stop major record labels from doing the same thing?

And as an aside, how do “major record labels “even exist today? Given the fact that CD sales are practically nonexistent, and vinyl is still something of a niche market

AI movies?

I also saw a video about a month or so back where there were some snippets from movies that were created entirely using Google Veo 3. The results are somewhat shocking: AI characters, AI backgrounds. Evidently even the scripts were generated using AI. There was nothing originally human that went into the creation of these movie clips.

And while some of them looked really good visually, it was still easy to tell that these were AI generated videos. There’s a certain artificiality to AI images that I have difficulty putting in words. But for the most part when I look at an AI generated image, I can just tell that it’s not real.

But I think that within just a few short years, we will look at this current crop of AI created content much in the same way that we look at computer generated special effects from the early 1990s: impressive, given the timeframe but still primitive compared to what comes in the years ahead,

This is an AI-generated movie clip using the Google Veo 3 program

A disclaimer about this blog

But even looking at this very blog: for the last several days I’ve been using ChatGPT to generate featured graphics for several of my latest posts

To you, my readers and fellow bloggers I can promise this: Your Favorite Blogger will never resort to using artificial intelligence to generate a response to a writing prompts or even a random post like this. That’s right. You’re stuck with my incoherent rambling and weak attempts to manipulate my thoughts and words into something remotely entertaining .

I have, and will probably continue to use AI generated images from time to time. However, I always will have at least one disclaimer about that somewhere on the individual post.

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