He opened with “Rick Beato certainly has the
evidence.”
The relevant video that doesn’t get included
is So It Begins...Is This
A Real Band Or AI?, in which Beato explained how and why he believed The
Velvet Sundown is an AI band. The video
that Townsend linked to is I'm
Sorry...This New Artist Completely Sucks, showing that a new A indie rocker
called Eli Mercer can be created using AI to produce lyrics and music.
My
favorite comment is from @johnlarsson6029
4 days ago
Sadly, Eli
will never experience the joy of having his gear stolen or getting screwed.
There's
also @KingBeevr 4 days ago
Here's how
you know this is AI: nobody actually dreams of going TO west Texas. Everybody
wants to gtfo of west Texas.
How quickly we all forgot about David Cope’s
invention Emily Howell
and the Centaur Records release from 2010. Does The Velvet Sundown have two
albums out? Okay, that means if it’s an
AI band that cranked out two albums they’re fifteen years behind an album of
classical music that was the result of AI composition.
Now here in 2025 there’s no reason for me to
assume anyone remembers an article by Chris Wilson for Slate from May 19, 2010? Check out I'll
Be Bach: A computer program is writing great, original works of classical
music. Will human composers soon be obsolete? Nor would people be likely to
recall Heather Horn's Could
Computers Compose as Well as Bach? from May 20, 2010. The idea was expressed that the resultant
music was surprisingly good for AI-generated music. Rick Beato has not necessarily nuked pop any
more than classical music has been shown up by an album of Howell.
But go over and see how many subscribers Emily
Howell has on Youtube. David Cope pointed out that when he played Emily
Howell’s computer-generated classical pieces people couldn’t tell that they
were listening to music that wasn’t composed by a human.
You can hear the thing over on Youtube these
days.
https://www.youtube.com/@emilyhowell2359/videos
Since the album has been our for The fugue
subjects are too long and there’s not enough rhythmic contrast between subject
and countersubjects. In what used to be
called Baroque music there was what Manfred Bukofzer called “the contrast
motif”. You didn’t just bash one riff into the ground, you had a contrasting
riff at some point. Even riff-bashers
extraordinaire Led Zeppelin understood that after minutes of chugging along
with a vamp you create drama by changing the riff. It’s not just about
changing the textures by adding lower-register voices into a fugue, its about
changing the materials.
I wrote recently about The Velvet Sundown
coverage and you can read that here
if you like. The crisis of AI-generated music is a crisis for the priests and
brokers of art and Art Religion because, to invoke Leviticus, you’re not
supposed to be able to offer a virtual sacrificial animal on the altar of
Art. Actual sacrificial animals have
blood and skin and dung that has to be taken outside the camp, depending on the
kind of sacrifice being offered. I’ve
been reading books by Gordon
Wenham, Jay Sklar and Jacob
Milgrom on Leviticus this year
We live in such heathenish times regarding the
Abrahamic religions and in such days as people are so steeped on the Romantic
concept of original genius that many brokers and pundits of culture rush to
disdain the music of AI on the basis of it not being “real” and because real
art is supposed to be original.
Originality was not necessarily valued in the ancient world. Jerome Walsh
pointed out in his commentary on 1 Kings in the Berit Olam series that
ancient writers of what we now regard as the Hebrew Bible didn’t value “originality”. The practice in the past was not to seek out
creating “new” but transformative imitation of the existing. Translation, transformation and recalibration
of the existing has been what people do in the arts (and elsewhere) for all
human history. When Johann Sebastian Bach indulged in a great deal of
self-recycling in his Mass in B
minor and Christmas Oratorio
nobody was going to fault him for not being “original”. If even the most conservative Christian
scholars recognize that Solomonic wisdom traditions drew upon Egyptian
precedents we have yet more evidence that transformative imitation has been an
artistic norm far longer than the ideal of “nobody has done this before!” Qoholet would say anyone who tells you that
is an idiot. What has been is what will be again.
But now we can have programs do that for us! Transformative
imitation is exactly what AI does. What makes it so offensive and troubling
is that “we”, we humans, set out to create an AI that does transformative imitation
for us so we don’t have to do it all the old way. What Rick Beato gets at is that AI cannot
replicate the 47 years of playing guitar and mastering songcraft that goes into
what humans do. There’s an even more
visceral way to put it, the moral objection people have to AI-generated arts is
that it is something we believe cannot be outsourced. Your baby has to learn how to walk one foot
at a time and that is not something that can be handed off to an app or a
program. But it would be just as wrong
to say your baby who’s learning to walk isn’t making an intense cognitive
effort to master walking as a mental and physical process.
Songs for babies and the simple-minded, that’s
actually another reason I don’t think Rick Beato “nuked” pop. There’s a kind of stupid that only a human
can make, the kind that, as yet, I have not heard AI generate. There’s a whole lot of music we humans make
for babies and toddlers. A lot of it is
even kinda dumb but, you know what? That
baby or toddler who’s singing back to us doesn’t care. There’s a kind of dumb
that humans share as a bonding experience that AI could replicate but … there’s
a kind of bad that’s bad with intent. I have to ask, Is AI-generated pop really
worse than “Baby
Shark”, “Two of
Hearts”, “Shape
of You” or “Coconut”?
Some of the dumbest songs I’ve ever
heard in my life were written by flesh and blood people.
That AI can be dumb is easy to show. The
AI image of the wise old man hugging a unicorn is not hard to find. The
thing is people choose dumb, and in the best comedies, choose dumb because it’s
dumb. The comedy of errors will never go out of style and the comedy of stupid
people who think they aren’t stupid has been with us for the whole of human
history. I watch films by Whit Stillman, read manga by Rumiko Takahashi, or
read novels by Jane Austen I know I’m going to read about the misadventures
and conversations of some seriously dumb people, even dumb people who sincerely
think they’re clever.
People who talk about the arts seem to want to
talk about the amazing and profound heights of the sublime that AI can’t
replicate, such as the Matthew Passion by Bach. But then there’s the Coffee Cantata. Ah,
yes! Coffee, more wonderful than a
thousand kisses! Dad’s afraid his daughter’s addiction to coffee is so bad it’s
like she’s some delinquent meth user. No
husband for you, daughter of mine, unless you swear off coffee! Oh, well, mom chugged down coffee and grandma
did, too, so, uh, I guess if the daughter is a caffeine junky that can’t be
helped.
I’m hardly surprised that Romantics and
neo-Romantics are aghast that AI and “the algorithm” threatens to sap away the
place of the arts and artists made by people.
The artists and poets and songwriters who are the seers and prophets and
mages of us all won’t have anything they can do if AI takes over their sacred
domain. People are afraid that AI can
replicate the sublime and can forget that part of being human is that we can
choose the stupid. Maybe there’s a kind of stupid to which AI generated music
has yet to descend? Life is full of pathos and bathos. Could AI compose the Coffee Cantata? Maybe. Rickrolling to the point of
making a piano concerto is something an AI “could” be told to do but a human
would have actual fun making the joke, at every level of “making”. The comic image of the wise old man whose
skull has been pierced by the horn of a unicorn is a funny image and it’s funny
because someone prompted AI to generate an image and the image came off with a
basic, dumb mistake. But it’s a basic
dumb mistake of the kind we can already make ourselves. The AI was prompted to
generate a sublime image that turned out to be silly. The difference we need to keep appreciating is
humans can choose the silly that AI does because it follows a prompt.
It's “deep background” to remember Emily
Howell’s computer-generated music as “we” discuss The Velvet Sundown. We didn’t
get swamped with albums of music by Emily Howell since 2010. I don’t think Rick Beato nuked pop any more
than I think David Cope, via Emily Howell, nuked 18th century
contrapuntal writing by showing that a program can be used to replicate many
elements of a musical style. Fifteen years after the album was released the
people who like the music generated by Emily Howell like it for what it
is. The precedent is instructive because
the use of AI was literally the selling point for the music. The AI band and its AI music has been
presented as a provocation to explore the blurriness of authorship.
I’m a little surprised Ted Gioia didn’t wade
into The Velvet Sundown coverage until very recently. He has gotten to it,
although striking a far more triumphalist note than I think I could:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/we-are-winning
We
Are Winning!
Something
has changed in the last few days.
Ted Gioia
Jul 18,
2025
…
The widespread mockery of the fake AI band Velvet
Sundown might have been the turning point. This blew up in the last few days,
and left AI promoters reeling.
Velvet Sundown is a non-existent AI band that got a
million plays on Spotify. These deceptions have occurred in the past, but
something different happened this time.
Music fans started mocking Spotify and its alleged
promotion of a stupid slop band. The company was subjected to a level of
ridicule and angry denunciation it has never endured before.
I received numerous emails and texts from people
complaining about this. They felt insulted and duped.
Journalists
called this out as a hoax or fraud.
And many speculated about Spotify’s role in the charade. After all, the company
has been caught promoting AI slop in the past.
But this
time Spotify got turned into a joke—or even worse. They were linked to a scam
so clumsy that everyone was now making fun of them, as well as scrutinizing
their policies and practices.
Rick
Beato’s response to Velvet Sundown got two million views—so
more people were watching takedowns of the band than listening to it. An
industry group even demanded
disclaimers and regulation.
…
Who is this “we” and what are “we”
winning? Are we winning in a battle to
ensure that pop songs generated by the inbred grandchildren of Clippy and
Autocorrect don’t make it on to streaming services? Hurrah! But then I think back to how the
songs I hate the most by the bands I can’t stand were written by people. Most
of those four-chord soul bros who are maybe cursive singing their torch songs
and ballads are real guys.
Ted Gioia is ever against “the algorithm” and
the technocrats and the big suits. It’s
the standard Romantic posture and I am not particularly Romantic. But what is “the algorithm”? If it is simply
a shorthand or a slur for technology this doesn’t tell us what an algorithm is
as a human creation and a human’s cognitive process or tool. I couldn’t get past about half a minute of a
song by The Velvet Sundown. I’m not
going to defend that sonic tripe, but I do find it curious that when I hear
people reacting to it and to that, the concerns seem to cluster around an idea
that there is something missing from the music.
It’s like people want to say there’s something
sublime that’s missing in something that sounds, on the surface, cosmetically
beautiful. Edmund Burke distinguished
between the “merely” beautiful and the sublime. AI does what it is prompted to
do but it doesn’t seem as though AI gets prompted to do ironic or subversive
juxtaposition. Part of what makes Stevie
Wonder’s “Village Ghetto Land” such a great song is the music conveys a kind of
neo-galant high class string quartet playing at a swanky party while the song’s
narrator describes life in the ghetto where babies die before they’re born. Our
human capacity to juxtapose the sublime and the sordid as interwoven aspects of
the human condition is something that probably “could” be handed off to AI but
it’s the kind of thing only fellow humans can understand. Just sticking with
the Bible there’s the pastoral beauty of Psalm 23 and the gruesome toilet humor
of Judges 3.
As Rick Beato put it about those AI-generated
lyrics, they’re okay. That’s the real
problem. “Okay” does not reflect the
highest heights of love, compassion and thought with the lowest lows of
cruelty, hedonism and foolishness that we can find in our most beloved
stories. If you prompt AI to write
lyrics about the quest to find your true self why wouldn’t AI crank out a bunch
of stuff that fits that trope? It will
do what it’s told to do.
I don’t think we’re winning anything. Because The Velvet Sundown has been in the
news it’s worth remembering that fifteen years ago there was Emily Howell. If
David Cope hadn’t spent years refining Emily Howell would the AI used to make the
band and the songs of The Velvet Sundown be what they’ve been? Let’s consider
the possibility that what these things are symptoms of is how we think about
form, style and genre—if our styles and genres hadn’t become so stratified,
balkanized and routinized across the classical and pop divides, the crisis of
AI being in any way effective at mimicking them wouldn’t be what it is for the
kinds of people who get scared that AI will take away our arts. But, as Alan Jacobs has been pondering it, “the
humanism of leftovers” isn’t going to work.
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