A Canadian's AI hoax duped the media and propelled a 'band' to success
36 comments
·July 6, 2025qingcharles
This YouTube channel was adding millions more subscribers than MrBeast last month and was the highest gaining channel on the platform. It is just hundreds of AI-generated songs:
https://www.youtube.com/@MastersOfProphecy
I don't like any of the music, but I did stumble across an AI song I actually thought was pretty good the other day.
We shouldn't be worried about the ones that are obviously AI. We should be worried about the ones which are stealth and under-the-radar. This time next year I would imagine AI will have a #1 track somewhere in the world.
userbinator
I fell down the AI music rabbithole several months ago, not realising that I was listening to AI, and when I found out, I was impressed. There's definitely a lot of unconscious bias in subjective matters, such that explicitly marketing your music as AI-generated is unlikely to gain much support.
neom
Here is his medium post on the matter: https://medium.com/@andrew.frelon/i-am-andrew-frelon-the-guy...
muglug
How was there any doubt this band was AI? Anyone who's heard the output of Suno can identify the strangled AI-generated vocals in an instant.
Marsymars
The article touches on that - if you’re not familiar with Suno, you still will be familiar with autotuned vocals, so if you hear some Suno-generated stuff, it’s not going to seem unreasonable that it could just be some other digitally-tuned thing.
Animats
Nobody seems to be complaining that it's bad music. What's the problem?
viraptor
It is bad though. The tone is really similar on all the tracks, the solos are closer to guitar noodling, the structure is extremely predictable, etc. Ok, maybe not strictly bad - but definitely not good. Like, I'm not good and I feel like I could write a lot of similar stuff given enough effort and trying to sample bits of Led Zeppelin, Omega and others.
RealStickman_
If you're knowledgeable enough in music theory most songs are predictable.
viraptor
There's "understood within the commonly used systems" predictable and there's "boring simple and repetitive" predictable. This band is both.
null
tgv
So I copy someone's music, publish it under my name, and then say "Nobody seems to be complaining that it's bad music. What's the problem?"
First, people listen to absolute garbage. General taste is not a standard. Second, the quality of the music doesn't make other problems magically disappear. This music is built on enormous amounts of other people's music, and at the same time threatens to almost completely undermine music making, from amateur to megastar. That's a problem.
adastra22
We’ve had engineered hits from committees dominating pop music for decades now. This doesn’t seem any less authentic, and apparently people like it.
Really, what’s the difference between this and virtual bands like Gorillaz?
viraptor
Have you actually listened to this band and to Gorillaz? There's really no comparison: velvet sundown is just boring - there's nothing there, there. There's no interesting motifs or story telling, no memorable riffs or solos, no surprising structure.
> and apparently people like it.
That remains to be seen. The early plays were bought to get the recommendations. (Tens of thousands of plays, but all within ~100 of each other for the less popular tracks) We really don't know how many people listened to this yet.
Supermancho
> Have you actually listened to this band and to Gorillaz? There's really no comparison
The comparison is that they are both fictional bands. The received popularity of the music is irrelevant.
Did you not understand the point of the GP?
otrack
So true.
clauderoux
For those who don't know, "frelon" is French for hornet.
null
sherdil2022
“AI or not” is going to be the norm going forward. It already is in many areas and services.
Sad state of affairs for creatives and non-creatives alike.
echelon
> “AI or not” is going to be the norm going forward
The new "is it Photoshop?"
It'll be so pervasive that the average Instagram user will become fluent.
People are going to get so used to this technology. It's going to be added to everything.
> Sad state of affairs for creatives and non-creatives alike.
Heavy disagree. I absolutely love AI generated content, and my friends and I have been using the tools quite a bit:
Other people are making really cool stuff, too.
Hollywood never catered to what I wanted. We lived in a drought where 20,000 yearly film students had to fight for 100 roles of autonomy (most often won by nepotism). I certainly never made it, despite trying. Now I can make the stuff I want to see for myself.
0xfaded
It seems, though I have no way of knowing, that these clips were conceived by a human and realized using AI tools.
How would you feel if these were presented amongst a sea of other clips that were prompted by "create a short video that captures the attention of a 25-30yo male", presumably in the hope of syphoning a few cents from Instagram?
I recently bought a book to read on a flight, and it was the first time it occured to me there was no way to verify the thing was written by a human other than to check that it was published before ~2023. Part of what I, at least, feel when reading a book is a connection to another human and our shared experience that lead them to tell their story. For me this experience is steeply cheapened by the thought that that connection might not be with a human.
I feel similarly about the Ghibli style transfer craze. AI generated images may be "cool", but you no longer know if you're connecting to an artist. At least in the case of Ghibli, their work is well known so it's possible to tell. Where's the room for human creatives to create new original art styles? The rightful default assumption is that anything post 2023 came out of a model as some mash-up of inputs stolen from anonymous no-names.
FWIW, this is coming from a non-creative atheist who has long belived humans are nothing more than probabilistic biological machines.
userbinator
Keep in mind that even with AI-generated content, a human ultimately came up with the idea and told the AI to do it.
SoftTalker
I think it's cool if you're making something for yourself.
Not cool if you're a media corporation generating something, slapping DRM on it, and trying to pass it off as the work of real human artists so that they don't have to pay real human artists.
satvikpendem
Lots of jobs in the past have been obviated away from technological advances, there is no difference in this current generation of jobs either. No one still thinks of the farrier when talking about cars (and even then, farriers still exist).
aspenmayer
You don’t have to buy products that aren’t certified-AI-free. You’re not obligated to buy many things, though existing without expenditure is more of a life goal and less of a realistic expectation.
badsectoracula
Considering the discussion, IMO that one feels more relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj-dJvGVb-w
(i loved those videos btw)
computerthings
[dead]
It’s hard to understand the actual timeline from this news article. It references hundreds of thousands of plays as success, but also explains that it was already going around social media as a controversy and a mystery.
Unless I’m reading this wrong, I assume many of those streams were from people seeing the mystery on social media and checking out the songs. The article tries to imply it was all organic success from people who liked it, but it’s clear that the mystery of the AI generated music was part of the social media explosion that propelled the listens.