Earlier this month, you might have read about a new artist called The Velvet Sundown, who quickly amassed half a million listeners for their two albums on Spotify, despite the fact that, in flesh and blood terms, they don't actually exist. A spokesman for the AI-created band, Andrew Frelon - not his real name, incidentally - was entirely unapologetic for their fake existence, and had some questions of his own for society.
"We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real," he told Rolling Stone. "And that’s messed up, but that’s the reality that we face now. So it’s like, ‘Should we ignore that reality?"
Food for thought.
Anyways, if this makes you mad, you'll doubtless be even more irritated when you see exactly how easy it is for anyone to create their very own AI-generated musical superstar-in-waiting.
Using the attention-grabbing headline "I'm Sorry...This New Artist Completely Sucks" popular YouTube personality Rick Beato, who has 5.1 million subscribers to his channel, demonstrates the step-by-step process involved in generating the artist of your dreams, or worst nightmares.
Beato's creation, 'Eli Mercer', an alt.country newcomer, was generated using an AI program called SUNO. First, Beato creates an avatar for his fake musician using Chat GPT, then asks another AI program, Claude, to write song lyrics for his ghost singer-songwriter, 'Eli Mercer', with the prompt that the song should concern "a college student dropping out to pursue their dream as a novelist living in west Texas". Once the lyrics to West Texas Dreams have been generated, Beato simply pastes them into SUNO, and - hey presto! - two versions of a song are created.
Beato goes on to say that he thinks that it's "lame" that Spotify permits the monetization of fake music on its platform, while acknowledging "They don't care what I think."
Watch the thought-provoking video, and the first - and hopefully only - song attributed to 'Eli Mercer' below.
The comments beneath the videos, to be fair, are entertaining in their own right.
"I went to high school with Eli and I dated his sister until a West Texas tornado sadly sucked her up one fateful day," writes one commentator. "Never found her body. I hope Eli writes a song about that someday. Might require a banjo. But I digress; Eli’s music is just as good as my memories of him…"
"I grew up with Eli in Lubbock, TX," another YouTuber posts. "After working with our dads harvesting cotton, we'd ride our Huffy bikes into town and get slurpees at the Circle K. He was always writing stuff in his this tattered old notebook and told me one day he was "gonna get the hell outta here". Guess he made it."
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