A band called Velvet Sundown has racked up nearly 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify and one of their songs has been listened to 1.2 million times.
Impressive numbers for a band that doesn’t fucking exist.
Velvet Sundown is an Ai creation made using an Ai music tool, probably Suno. Tools like Suno scrape the web for every available component part to a song, every chord progression, every lyric, every melody it can get its code on, then pump you out a tune based on a handful of user inputs.
The sheer volume of data these tools are trained on make it impossible to determine what original songs an Ai is utilising when it creates something, and therefore very difficult, if not impossible, to lodge legal challenges under copyright laws (although music labels are trying).
Numbers like those achieved by Velvet Sundown will have made its creator a decent income, which of course is the singular motivation. This is not a creative or artistic project. It is a purely capitalist one.
Velvet Sundown (which is shite, by the way) isn’t the only big Ai musician on Spotify. Country music ‘project’ Aventhis has over 1 million monthly Spotify listeners with their most-played song having over 2 million streams. There are other Ai creations on Spotify (all ‘verified’ with the Spotify tick I should add, making a mockery of the verification label) with hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners.
The rise of fake Ai music began with the ‘lo-fi’ genre of music which is characterised by a primitive, DIY-style instrumental approach. The basic nature of lo-fi means it has been easy pickings for people looking to profit using generative Ai music tools. Music magazine Pitchfork reported recently that creators who previously made a living uploading their lo-fi tunes to YouTube have effectively been de-monetised by the sheer quantity of Ai-made junk that now dominates the lo-fi genre on YouTube, some of which gets millions of views.
The rise of fake Ai creations isn’t just restricted to music. Decently-selling novels and poetry have been made by Ai and there are numerous videos on YouTube celebrating this as a good thing and telling you how you too can become a best-selling ‘author’ by using Ai tools.
What are we doing here? This isn’t about being able to tell fact from fiction, the real from the robot. It isn’t even about the deadening of the human experience. This is about something much more profound and insidious. This is the deadening of the human being. This is the deadening of our selves.
What are we actually doing? Do we really want to surrender our imaginations and sacrifice our neurons for machines and the money behind the machines? The message of Ai generated creative content is that there’s no value in anything, not even in the human brain itself, the thing that makes everything possible, the thing that connects us to gods and monsters to angels and devils and all that is in between. In the use and consumption of Ai, people are casually handing over the primary element that sits at both the core of our individuality and our entire existence as a species.
The emergence of Ai art is entirely logical under capitalism. Because Ai music and writing tools valorise the output over the creation. They exist not to enhance the creative process but to strip out the creative from the process. From an ideological perspective, it is an intensely capitalistic endpoint. The essence is the output. And because the output is what sells, what gets downloaded and streamed, that’s the virtue. There’s only profit, is the message. And even our brains are not sacred.
How long before a best-selling novel has been generated by someone who inputted a few prompts on a generative Ai model? How long before an Ai generated band is headlining Glastonbury? We know what screens are doing to our brains. What will making and consuming massive amounts of Ai content do to them?
We’re moving on from the era of Ai slop, of low quality content without purpose, value or meaning, to something worse. We’re heading into the era of Ai with a clear purpose (monetary profit) and in which people do find value and meaning, as the millions of Velvet Sundown streams testify to. We’re moving into the Ai slop plus+ era.
Welcome to the shitegeist.
Because in hoovering up everything that exists digitally, all the music, all the writing, all the images, then enabling us to feed it back to ourselves, spliced, parcelled and stolen, Ai is consuming human culture and cannibalising the human.
And let’s remember that when we say Ai, we mean us.
We mean those very same humans.
Humans who program it, finance it, and use it. This isn’t an alien invasion falling out of a clear blue sky. Like every threat to our bodies and our minds, people are doing this. People did this.
These choices, choices to lessen our humanity, are being actively made every single day.
Do we not want to be human?
Sometimes I wonder.
Start liking it. It's the next logical step, from The Monkees to The Archies to this.
Imagine a novel derived from a sampling of upbeat sources mashed in with snippets of despair and righteous indignation. Malevolent retired literature instructors will rue never being able to task their worst students with a critical analysis of this 'work' and the coming multitudes of others of this ilk.
Each passing day reveals my cynicism to be well-founded. To not be jaded is sadly naïve these days. This is sickening ...