Phony war

AI-generated music can be great, but the artists whose work helped build it need to be paid.

- PETER GRIFFIN

There's a band you've probably never listened to which has recently set the internet ablaze with debate about the future of music.

Actually, the Velvet Sundown isn't a band at all, more a fever dream created by a computer. When the “artist” racked up over one million monthly listeners on Spotify with an album of guitar-driven soft rock tunes, it had many scratching their heads over the identity of this slick new act.

But the giveaway was the AI-generated photo of the band, complete with telltale weird fingers and guitar strings in the wrong places. The truth was that this four-piece indie act was generated entirely using AI.

To find out how simple that was to do, I created a song myself on the platform Suno, which is being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for allegedly pillaging a vast number of songs to train its AI machine on.

The prompt I gave Suno for my song was very simple: “modern progressive rock, soaring guitar solo in the middle, with the lyrics inspired by Dark Side of the Moon about the pressures of modern life”.