‘Spokesperson' for AI ‘Band' Velvet Sundown Now Says He's a Hoaxer
A Velvet Sundown X account that's linked to from the band's Spotify page messaged Rolling Stone early Thursday morning asking for a correction and reiterating their disavowal of Frelon. 'We understand the intrigue our project inspires — and we're not here to dispel mystery,' the Spotify-linked account Twitter said in a DM early Thursday morning. '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.' (The 'band' have not yet responded to a request for further comment.)
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In his lengthy Medium post, Frelon claims that he took advantage of the Velvet Sundown's lack of social-media presence and transformed another account he had started in March into what purported to be the band's 'official account.' From there, he claims, he used a long list of 'social engineering' tricks, including interactions with the media, to make it appear to be the band's actual account — with the supposed aim of testing journalists. 'Knowing from past projects something about the dynamics of journalistic news coverage,' he writes, 'I thought it would be funny to start calling out journalists in a general way about not having reached out to 'us' for commentary.' Frelon also told Rolling Stone on Wednesday that he had a strong interest in 'art hoaxes.' (The phone number Frelon called from, with a 514 area code, now has a 'not in service' message.)
Despite the obvious AI origins of its photos and music, Velvet Sundown has been picked up on numerous Spotify playlists, attaining substantial listenership that led to widespread media coverage. Glenn McDonald, a former 'data alchemist' at Spotify, told Rolling Stone that their prominence on the streaming service is emblematic of a move 'away from understandable algorithms with strong grounding in actual human listening and communities' and toward AI-driven systems that 'can pick songs for recommendations based on characteristics of their audio.'
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