The bots are coming for the bards.

We’ve seen much of how ChatGPT has impacted education, journalism, and computing, but what are AI programs up to in the music industry?

Not surprisingly, AI is certainly infiltrating music platforms, particularly Spotify, and perhaps no other guide can explain what’s going on quite like Rick Beato. Beato has a popular YouTube channel where he interviews musicians, producers, and writers, and offers enlightening commentary on music and the industry more broadly. A few days ago, Beato demonstrated how simply by typing a couple of prompts into two AI systems, Claude and Suno, he could create an entire song that sounds, believe it or not, pretty good. You can take a listen yourself:

Beato was able to create a couple of variations of the same song, and while the music isn’t anything phenomenal, I confess that if the song randomly aired on the radio and I didn’t already know it was fake, I would have fallen for it.

The reason for this, of course, is that AI systems copy from actual musicians, songs, and musical styles. The song Beato generates is believable because it manufactures the kind of voice many of us have heard before: Soulful, folksy, and heartfelt.

It’s impressive, but also bizarre and disorienting.

The Velvet Sundown, Everyone’s Favorite Fake Band

Recently, Spotify was found to be publishing AI-generated songs by deceased musicians. 404 Media reported the story, noting how a new song, “Together,” appeared on Blaze Foley’s Spotify profile. Foley, a country singer, died in 1989.

In addition to publishing fake songs attached to real singers, AI bands are starting to pop up. Beato released another video discussing The Velvet Sundown, a new band that amassed hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify by the time his video came out. The only problem? The band wasn’t human. Beato used a computer program to try and “split” one of The Velvet Sundown’s tracks called “Dust on the Wind,” but it had trouble identifying the separate components of the song. Beato says that this might be because the song was entirely AI-generated.

It turned out that he was right.

In lieu of the band’s online bio, their suspiciously polished band photos, and Beato’s investigation, the whole thing was indeed a fiction created by someone behind the scenes using AI. I looked up the band on Spotify and saw that it now has over one million monthly viewers, and that the bio has been updated to reflect AI’s role in the songs’ production:

“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.”

The bio goes on to conclude: “Not quite human. Not quite machine. The Velvet Sundown lives somewhere in between.” It’s pithy, but what in the world does it mean?

In addition to the updated bio, the original images of four white hipster guys have been replaced with the graphic of the god Pan, half goat, half man, playing a pipe and dancing. An apt choice, perhaps, given The Velvet Sundown’s attempt to join the human and the mechanical into a new kind of organism.

The new bio, however, left me unsatisfied. At least the mind behind the “band” is now forthcoming about the role AI in the songs themselves, but the actual use of this technology in the creative process remains vaguely defined. What does it mean for a human person to provide “creative direction” and yet incorporate AI? Does it mean the mysterious person behind the scenes puts in the prompts, like Beato did in the first video, and then allows the AI systems to do the rest? Can we call that genuine creativity?

It’s unclear to me how Spotify (and YouTube) will respond to this new wave of supposedly human-AI hybrid music. In any case, while the music isn’t amazing, it’s also not terrible, which is probably why The Velvet Sundown got so much attention this past month. This story also calls into a deeper, more philosophical question over what counts as art in our digital age of AI copycats. Can AI be a genuine creative instrument, or does it always impair and detract from the creativity of actual human beings? Given that AI can still only scrape from the dustbins of preexisting material, the basic truth remains: AI can never be creative, let alone create.