The Velvet Sundown, a psychedelic rock band that has amassed over 850,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, has been making headlines this week because it doesn’t actually exist. None of the group’s four named musicians have given any interviews, and all photos posted on their social media accounts appear to have been made with AI, prompting accusations that their totally boilerplate music, too, is the product of generative AI.
On Wednesday, Rolling Stone published an interview with Andrew Frelon, who presented himself as a spokesperson and “adjunct” member of the band and claimed that the whole project was a deliberate hoax. “It’s trolling. 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?’” he explained. Turns out Frelon isn’t affiliated with the Velvet Sundown at all, according to the band’s Spotify bio.
In a message to Rolling Stone, the X account that’s linked to the “real” Velvet Sundown’s Spotify, wrote: “We understand the intrigue our project inspires — and we’re not here to dispel mystery. But we are here to correct the record….The Velvet Sundown is a multidisciplinary artistic project blending music, analog aesthetics, and speculative storytelling. While we embrace ambiguity as part of our narrative design, we ask that reporting on us be based on verifiable sources — not fabricated accounts or synthetic media.”
Frelon, who’s using a pseudonym, went on to write a Medium post about the situation. He explained that he specializes in generative AI systems “to uncover vulnerabilities in order to fix them” and further described himself as “an artist who has gained recognition for using generative AI for creative projects, some of which included using generative AI to generate and seed fake historical artifacts online in support of multiple interlocking art hoaxes.” Seeing all the stories TVS generated, he said, “Suddenly, I had the crazy idea, what if I inserted an extra layer of weird into this story? What if I re-purposed an old Twitter account I’d barely used for another project, and made that into an ‘official’ looking account for TVS?”
Frelon turned his idea into an opportunity for trolling and harassing music writers. In his post, he concluded: “I see what I have done as a kind of red-teaming of the media & platform ecosystems at large. I write this with the intent not of shaming anyone named in it, but in the hopes of inspiring a more careful approach to prevent the publication of blatantly false information by people with worse or more dangerous agendas than my own foolish experiment.” Feeling inspired, anyone?
