The Velvet Sundown: Inside the bizarre truth about popular band
Rivers run red, the drums roll slow. Tell me brother, where do we go?
These are the lyrics that open Dust On the Wind, the first track from The Velvet Sundown's debut album, Floating on Echoes. It landed on Spotify on June 5, a melancholic ballad about the bloody futility of war set to a twangy guitar riff.
Stylised images of the band showed singer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, keyboardist Milo Rains, and drummer Orion 'Rio' Del Mar, who looked like the bastard love children of a Crosby, Stills and Nash tribute act dressed exclusively in Mumford and Sons' cast offs.
Dust was soon appearing on Spotify playlists with hundreds of thousands of saves. In total, Floating has been streamed nearly five million times.
Then something very weird happened. On June 20 the Velvet boys put out a second album, Dust And Silence. It was all an unthinkably fast turnaround even for a band who can go vanilla-ishly against stereotype, has never seen the wrong end of a whiskey bottle or been plagued by toxic Liam/Noel juju.
Then came a third and a fourth album.
Their secret: The Velvet Sundown are AI-generated. Their music, promo shots and backstory were created by AI, The Guardian reported this week.
No one has copped to being the brains behind this all and once Velvet's unrealness started making headlines, 'they' changed 'their' bio to read, 'Not quite human. Not quite machine.'
Whether listeners twigged or not, between June 29 and July 1, Dust on the Wind topped Spotify's daily Viral 50 chart in Britain, Norway and Sweden.
Who knew the rise of our digital overlords would be quite so catchy? The Terminator never spun a decent tune now did he?
The bottom line: Hollywood and the music industry in particular are being run over by a truck driven by the creepily happy Gab, Lennie, Milo and Rio.
We have had months, years of Chicken Little-style sky-is-falling, doom-saying, and end-is-nighing about AI but now a terrifying amount is happening terrifyingly fast.
In January a podcast featuring legendary British broadcaster Michael Parkinson was launched, the debut episode seeing him speak to Jason Derulo. Unremarkable except for the fact that Parkinson died in 2023.
To create the show, his son and a production company trained an AI 'Parky' by feeding it the 2,000 real interviews he had done over his career.
In June, Vin Diesel announced the final installment in the Fast & Furious franchise - and promised to bring back Paul Walker's character. Walker, of course, was killed in a car accident in 2013.
Since 2023 the CAA talent agency, which represents stars like Beyoncé and George Clooney , has been quietly working to'capture the likeness of all its clients so it could own and control the rights to their image,' for possible future AI use, New York magazine recently revealed.
AI could also see the rise of 'fan episodes'.
Diehards of a particular show won't have to restrict themselves to writing exhaustively long, panty fan-fic but will one day be able to to 'create their own episodes', according to veteran TV producer and Thursday Murder Club author Richard Osman.
Speaking on his brilliant Rest is Entertainment podcast with co-host Marina Hyde, he argued that in the future actors and creators will not just sign up for projects but will sign 'a contract that allows an AI use of their image' within the 'gated wall' of a particular project or series. This will mean that fans will be able to 'constantly remix their favourite television programs' and 'create their own episodes' of hit shows.
(How many prompts are going to read 'Now kiss'?)
In Hollywood alone there are now nearly 100 AI studios.
'Everyone's using it,' a CAA agent told New York magazine. 'They just don't talk about it.'
The race is now on for the first fully AI series or movie.
Staircase studio took the lead in March when it released the first five minutes of what will be the feature-length The Woman With Red Hair, which will tell the true story of Dutch resistance fighter Johanna 'Hannie'. Helmed by a Divergent series producer, the Woman taster is an eerie watch. While some moments are obviously unreal, other shots, especially of streetscapes and sweeping city views, are spookily believable.
Fashion is not immune here. In March H&M released suitably artsy black and white shots of model Mathilda Gvarliani doing some pouting in a white tank.
Only one of them was the real Gvarliani.
This was part of the global fashion giant's project to create 30 digital 'twins' of actual models, which in turn they will use to create AI-generated images for marketing campaigns and social media. (The models will retain the rights to their digital replicas and the retailer said the AI images would be marked as such.)
Delve into how far and fast AI is reaching and it is breathtaking in every sense of the word. What The Velvet Sundown saga makes clear is that we might not quite have gotten to the other side of the uncanny valley but we are in the midst of a Gutenberg-like watershed moment for creative industries.
Very very soon, no camera shot will be impossible, no location out of reach, no pose unachievable, no sound uncreatable, no deadness of star insurmountable.
On one hand, this means the barriers for entry into the famously hard-to-break-into entertainment biz have just fallen. 19-years-old and have a brilliant film idea? Go forth and create.
On another, is anyone checking that the code doesn't careen off into the never never with no reasonable guard rails in place?
There is another 'but' in all of this too. (I like big 'buts' and I cannot lie.) Just because you can make it and use it doesn't mean people will eagerly take it up. Already, in some instances, the giddy adoption of AI is being met with a swift backlash.
On YouTube, The Woman With Red Hair taster has twice as many downvotes as upvotes.
In June, MrBeast, the world's biggest YouTuber with more than 385 million subscribers, announced he was launching an AI thumbnail generator, which would allow users to mimic aspects of existing video art. Such was the vehemence of reaction, he was forced to kill it a week later.
This month Spotify appeared to be cracking down on The Velvet Sundown, removing their fourth album and several uploads.
Hours before I was set to file this story, the 'band' threw a spanner in the works. 'They' took to X, formerly Twitter, posting an ostensibly behind-the-scenes video and writing, 'Everyone who said we're 'not real' and asked for 'video proof' can now see for themselves! WE ARE 100 REAL!'.
In the clip, the 'boys' say things like 'The song came to me after I fasted for three days in Joshua Tree with nothing but a deck of tarot cards' and 'I was trying to remember what stars sound like'.
Muddling things even further, a cameo from what appears to be The Eagles' Tim Schmit.
It's clearly not real-real per se but someone has to have laboured over a keyboard to conjure Gab, Lennie, Milo and Rio. Is it all an elaborate prank? A majors thesis in pixel form? A very bored 12-year-old's Frankenstein creation?
As a TV show once taught us, the truth is out there.
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