Demagogues have a particular way of speaking to and about people. Part incendiary wannabe bully, part whining and self-pitying martyr, nobody has to look hard to find it.
Nowadays, everybody in a position of power is talking like Kim Jong Un standing on the ledge of a building’s roof, and now even those with no real power are mimicking their weird, laughable way of talking.
When TechRadar dug into a host of inconsistencies and bizarre behavior that suggested a sudden Spotify hit band, the Velvet Sundown, “appears to be AI-generated,” a self-styled PR rep on X.com launched into a modern-day PR tantrum.
Nobody was much fooled, and surprise, surprise, but the spokesperson appears to have been a self-described hoaxer. Yeah, obviously. People have known that for a week, but perhaps it was hard to hear them over the sound of such vigorous patting of oneself on the back.
quacks like a duck, walks like a duck
Here was the first broadside fired by a person who claimed to be the band’s spokesperson, with an emphasis on claimed (more on that later): “Absolutely crazy that so-called “journalists” keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that The Velvet Sundown is “AI-generated” with zero evidence. Not a single one of these “writers” has reached out, visited a show, or listened beyond the Spotify algorithm.”
It was obviously aimed at the media outlets who’d quickly jumped on the story after TechRadar’s Graham Barlow broke his, and in the wake of the countless threads on Reddit and X excoriating the band.
Thing is, Barlow described the depths to which he went to research the Velvet Sundown’s strange lack of presence in the real world, and when he later reached out to the band’s “spokesperson” for an interview, the band ghosted him.
And then, “Just because we don’t do TikTok dances or livestream our process doesn’t mean we’re fake. The fact that some blog editors would rather pretend we’re a bunch of machines than admit an unknown band is out here grinding & made something people enjoy is insulting.”
And, “We’ve had to lock down our personal accounts due to harassment all because some writer wanted clicks & couldn’t imagine people like us existing outside their sanitized indie media echo chamber.”
Then, “Shame on every outlet amplifying this narrative. **We are REAL!** Think next time before you erase real people.”
Nobody seemed to be convinced. Not media, and not hoards of music fans who grew ever harsher in their criticism of the band and who began pointing out funny things in their own posts, such as guitarists missing fingers.
The “PR rep” tried a new tack and told TechRadar on July 3 that “Over the past days, a number of impersonator accounts have surfaced across social media platforms, publishing fabricated statements and AI-generated imagery falsely attributed to us. Unfortunately, some of this material was cited in your recent article.”
As the BBC wrote that day, “Further confusing the story, Rolling Stone US reported that the band’s spokesman had admitted The Velvet Sundown’s music had been generated using an AI tool called Suno—only for the magazine to report shortly afterwards that the spokesman was himself a hoax.
“The man, who goes by the name of Andrew Frelon, said it was a deliberate plot to hoax the media. A statement on the band’s Spotify page says that the group has ‘no affiliation with this individual, nor any evidence confirming their identity or existence.’”
A few days later, the band’s Spotify bio changed to say, “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.”
Whatever their association, “Frelon’s hoax” wasn’t a very good hoax on the media, because the media picked on it almost immediately through solid research, and the public largely turned on the band in force just as quickly. It seems more like an attempted hoax that sought to mock music fans, but only ended up galvanizing them further against AI music instead.
The post This Band Finally Admitted That They’re AI After Weeks of Controversy appeared first on VICE.
