Let’s get to the bottom of this Velvet Sundown fake band controversy [UPDATE]

[This was my column for GlobalNews.ca. – AC]

We’ve been acquainted with fake bands for years, animated proxies for real-life human meat bags who compose and perform the songs: The Archies, Prozzak, and Gorillaz are just a few examples.

If we want to get a little more complicated, there’s Japan’s Hatsune Miku, a holographic creation capable of performing live concerts using something called Vocoloid singing synthesis technologies developed by Yamaha. But she wouldn’t be able to perform without human-created music.

What do they all have in common? We know that they’re fake. Today… well, it’s getting difficult to determine what we’re being fed.

When we started talking about artificial intelligence a few years back, some openly wondered how long it would take before we had an AI music star. Technically, it seemed possible, if not for the fact that AI is not very intelligent. It’s a very powerful form of mimicry, but incapable of the emotion required to write music convincing to the human soul. Any music an AI program generates is based on analyzing millions of datapoints fed to it in the form of music written by flesh-and-blood musicians.

I read somewhere — and I’m paraphrasing — “Until an AI program falls in love and goes through a painful breakup, it will be incapable of writing an original song like Tammy Wynette’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

There have been attempts, of course.

Keep reading.

UPDATE: There have been some developments since this story was first published on July 6.

• The attention has pushed Velvet Sundown’s monthly listener total to over one million.
• The bio has been updated: “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence..This isn’t a trick – it’s a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI…All characters, stories, music, voices and lyrics are original creations generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools employed as creative instruments.”
• There’s a new song on Spotify called “Cardboard Sky”–but it’s from a different Velvet Sundown. It appears that there’s a fake of the fake, except that there are humans imitating the fake.