"Not long ago, a band called the Velvet Sundown started getting attention online. Two of its albums appeared in the course of just a few weeks, and were soon streamed millions of times. People noticed that its photogenic members had barely any social-media history, and that its sun-bleached desert rock sounded good but strangely thin. It seemed possible that the band was a product of artificial intelligence, and that its listeners were bots tasked with racking up plays to earn money from streaming services."
"The arts are prime targets for A.I.: they're often mediated through devices, they're intrinsically repetitive, and they're available online for A.I. to study. And yet the best art is also idiosyncratic and original; we like it in part because we're drawn to the people who've created it. It seems likely that, as generative art proliferates, A.I. will come to shape cultural life as much as the social-media algorithms shape it today."
A recently surfaced band, the Velvet Sundown, released two albums quickly and achieved millions of streams despite limited social-media history. Listeners and observers noted the band's photogenic members and thin-sounding sun-bleached desert rock, and suspicion grew that the project was synthetic. A Spotify biography update confirmed the Velvet Sundown was "a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction." The arts are vulnerable to generative A.I. because artistic output is mediated through devices, often repetitive, and widely available online for machine study. Generative tools like Suno can produce music, and the future of culture will depend on how much people value what machines cannot do.
Read at The New Yorker
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