AI Insights

Half a million Spotify users are unknowingly grooving to an AI-generated band

Published

2 months ago

June 30, 2025

Making art used to be a uniquely human endeavor, but machines have learned to distill human creativity with generative AI. Whether that content counts as “art” depends on who you ask, but Spotify doesn’t discriminate. A new band called The Velvet Sundown debuted on Spotify this month and has already amassed more than half a million listeners. But by all appearances, The Velvet Sundown is not a real band—it’s AI.

While many artists are vehemently opposed to using AI, some have leaned into the trend to assist with music production. However, it doesn’t seem like there’s an artist behind this group. In less than a month, The Velvet Sundown has released two albums on Spotify, titled “Floating On Echoes” and “Dust and Silence.” A third album is releasing in two weeks. The tracks have a classic rock vibe with a cacophony of echoey instruments and a dash of autotune. If one of these songs came up in a mix, you might not notice anything is amiss. Listen to one after another, though, and the bland muddiness exposes them as a machine creation.

Some listeners began to have doubts about The Velvet Sundown’s existence over the past week, with multiple Reddit and X threads pointing out the lack of verifiable information on the band. The bio lists four members, none of whom appear to exist outside of The Velvet Sundown’s album listings and social media. The group’s songs have been mysteriously added to a large number of user-created playlists, which has helped swell its listener base in a few short weeks. When Spotify users began noticing The Velvet Sundown’s apparent use of AI, the profile had around 300,000 listeners. It’s now over 500,000 in less than a week.

When The Velvet Sundown set up an Instagram account on June 27, all doubts were laid to rest—these “people” are obviously AI. We may be past the era of being able to identify AI by counting fingers, but there are plenty of weird inconsistencies in these pics. In one Instagram post, the band claims to have gotten burgers to celebrate the success of the first two albums, but there are too many burgers and too few plates, and the food and drink are placed seemingly at random around the table. The band members themselves also have that unrealistically smooth and symmetrical look we see in AI-generated images.

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AI Insights

General Counsel’s Job Changing as More Companies Adopt AI

Published

36 minutes ago

September 11, 2025

The Editors

The general counsel’s role is evolving to include more conversations around policy and business direction, as more companies deploy artificial intelligence, panelists at a University of California Berkeley conference said Thursday.

“We are not just lawyers anymore. We are driving a lot of the policy conversations, the business conversations, because of the geopolitical issues going on and because of the regulatory, or lack thereof, framework for products and services,” said Lauren Lennon, general counsel at Scale AI, a company that uses data to train AI systems.

Scattered regulation and fraying international alliances are also redefining the general counsel’s job, panelists …

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AI Insights

California bill regulating companion chatbots advances to Senate

Published

50 minutes ago

September 11, 2025

The Editors

The California State Assembly approved legislation Tuesday that would place new safeguards on artificial intelligence-powered chatbots to better protect children and other vulnerable users.

Introduced in July by state Sen. Steve Padilla, Senate Bill 243 requires companies that operate chatbots marketed as “companions” to avoid exposing minors to sexual content, regularly remind users that they are speaking to an AI and not a person, as well as disclose that chatbots may not be appropriate for minors.

The bill passed the Assembly with bipartisan support and now heads to California’s Senate for a final vote.

“As we strive for innovation, we cannot forget our responsibility to protect the most vulnerable among us,” Padilla said in statement. “Safety must be at the heart of all developments around this rapidly changing technology. Big Tech has proven time and again, they cannot be trusted to police themselves.”

The push for regulation comes as tragic instances of minors harmed by chatbot interactions have made national headlines. Last year, Adam Raine, a teenager in California, died by suicide after allegedly being encouraged by OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT. In Florida, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer formed an emotional relationship with a chatbot on the platform Character.ai before taking his own life.

A March study by the MIT Media Lab examining the relationship between AI chatbots and loneliness found that higher daily usage correlated with increased loneliness, dependence and “problematic” use, a term that researchers used to characterize addiction to using chatbots. The study revealed that companion chatbots can be more addictive than social media, due to their ability to figure out what users want to hear and provide that feedback.

Setzer’s mother, Megan Garcia, and Raine’s parents have filed separate lawsuits against Character.ai and OpenAI, alleging that the chatbots’ addictive and reward-based features did nothing to intervene when both teens expressed thoughts of self-harm.

The California legislation also mandates companies program AI chatbots to respond to signs of suicidal thoughts or self-harm, including directing users to crisis hotlines, and requires annual reporting on how the bots affect users’ mental health. The bill allows families to pursue legal action against companies that fail to comply.

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