The Velvet Sundown, the perfect mix for reaching average.

Image © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved.

Does The Velvet Sundown exist, or is it AI?

Did you know this was even a real question?

The thing about experiencing any kind of AI is the sense that you’re getting a solidly average return. This makes sense, since AI has been trained on human-created content and has learned to pull together an average of sorts. Even generative AI is still based on a foundation of the average.

So, back to The Velvet Sundown, which has a name that sounds like one of those Facebook memes where you choose your rockstar name based on the material of the pants you’re wearing and your favorite time of day. As of this writing, it’s an unknown band with unknown origins, which has over 500K followers on Spotify. All of this, despite what seems to be an AI-generated band description, hollow and empty AI photos of the supposed band members, and lyrics and tunes that sound just about right but also sort of average and oddly shallow. Even the song titles are strangely like a mashup of Americana greatest hits sort-of-but-not-quite.

Dust On The Wind.

Drift Beyond The Flame.

The Wind Still Knows Our Name.

End The Pain.

Rebel Shout.

Smoke And Silence.

Floating On Echoes.

As The Silence Falls.

It feels like someone ran an AI prompt that asked for words that are nearly tangible but mostly ethereal, sort of like the sense you get when you listen to the band’s music or a politician.

It’s as if you mashed up Kansas-era bands (whose great song “Dust In The Wind” is one preposition away from The Velvet Sundown’s song), general melancholy protest lyrics about The Man and subsequent futility in life, and artists like Ben Howard.1 A bit edgy, but not too much, something nice you can rebel to in your 20s and 30s, but still feel okay about in your 40s and 50s.

Even the band members seem a perfect average of what looks like an odd mix of Scott Stapp, Dana Carvey, a young Richard Dreyfuss, and maybe a guru. It’s a mix of skin tones, neither too dark nor too light, to create…an average. The photo resembles an Instagram filter gone wrong, the perfect blend of forced yellowing and gritty age, right at home in a feed where a 20-something features photos of their old-school film camera, typewriter, and record player to let the world know they’re an old soul with vintage vibes, never having had to swear at a typewriter while trying to count characters half and back in order to center the title on a term paper.

I’m not an audiophile, but perhaps those training AI should have been, because according to Rick Beato—a talented musician, music producer, songwriter, audio engineer, and educator—AI was trained on MP3s.

True music aficionados know that MP3s are of lower quality compared to other audio formats, thanks to their lossy compression, which means key audio information is discarded to reduce file size so you can download songs via services like Napster and Limewire, ideal for streaming since they take up less bandwidth. Training AI on the MP3 format means that its ability to create music (at least for now) is hampered somewhat. Training AI on how people behave online means it’s also hampered somewhat, but that horse is out of the barn. Anyway, perhaps this AI pop star functions fine in the streaming and MP3 realm, but it struggles elsewhere, or at least in the problem of mushy tracts full of, as Beato calls them, artifacts.

I’m not a music expert like Beato. I play several instruments, but mostly to the detriment of my neighbor and cat. I can’t speak too much to that method of testing whether something is a real person or AI. What I do know is words.

Granted, there are plenty of stinker lyrics written by humans, the king of which is probably Lenny Kravitz’s song “Fly Away” which has lyrics that read like a fourth grader’s first attempt at poetry, but once again, in search of the average, AI has spared us from the pit of bad-lyric despair but prevented us from the heights of glory in that, at least in the lyrics to Velvet Sundown’s song “Dust On The Wind,” we get just about every lyrical trope we would find in a song with a minor key.

Biblical (Ecclesiastes) and Buddhist hints at the futility of life. Some general war protest imagery. Some more Biblical and poetic metaphors about rivers running red. The general dissatisfaction of youth looking for aching metaphors as they come to terms with Federal withholding from their paychecks.

 Marching, peace, flags, sacred land, ashes, mama, prayer, make a stand—why not just ask AI to write a poem about all of the human struggles expressed in music and poetry from 1960 onward? It would be this song.

Most of our entertainment now serves as background noise only; few of us are actually sitting down and giving full attention to the audio or the visual. It’s there to give us something to look up at now and then as we scroll on our mobile devices. So average entertainment is good enough.

But for a first major round, The Velvet Sundown, possibly being AI, is scary. If the group isn’t AI, they are terrible at being human or great at being average. So basically, we’re all screwed, and I finally have a legitimate reason to explain why I don’t generally listen to a lot of new music and stick with my old tried-and-trues.

A lot of things about AI bother me, few more than it mostly seems like older people are most bothered. We’ve already lost the younger generation’s ability to have eye contact and carry on conversations with adults; now they don’t even care if humans or machines entertain them.

There are many other concerns with AI, of course.

Is it going to accelerate mental illness? Are we in the early formation stages of the Idiocracy? Is it demonic?

Whether or not AI is or can be demonic is a topic of debate, but I do know this: God is the Creator, and we are made in His image, part of which means we are also creative. His enemy only knows how to copy, or to inspire us to accept copying as acceptable. AI has that same characteristic, only knowing how to copy or mimic what comes out of truly creative beings, fooling those same beings into accepting facsimiles as good enough.

As an artist and writer, I have never been entirely fond of the mashup, the remix, or the reboot, at least beyond the one-off. Habitual regurgitation only erodes the creative enamel. At some point, we must each come up with our own ideas and exercise the creativity God has put in us. I’m not saying we have to all be artists, but we should all have some ideas in some realm of existence, even if it’s how to fix the sink better.

At the movies recently, I only saw one movie preview that was for a new movie property; all the rest were parts of series, reboots, or remakes.2 

This feels like what AI is doing, though currently, until the singularity when Terminator 2 becomes our field guide, it is happening at the hands of a supposedly creative human being writing the AI prompt. Perhaps, because we are used to average content based on reboots and remixes, we are more susceptible than ever. Average sounds good, sort of like a non-biting mosquito buzzing in the background while we check our notifications.

It feels like we’re retreating from the light at the end of the tunnel, cozy in the gray areas that blanket the earth at sundown.

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1 Some say Velvet Sundown is real. Others are doubling down and saying they aren’t. I leave that up to you and the proof of time. If they are actually four real guys, they are either masters of rage-marketing or complete morons. Regardless, people are dying to know, and for real people, that’s money in the bank.

2 I often remind my friend of my days at a startup, where I started a fake economy, an Easter candy hunt, and other fun activities, only to have one of the other employees copy them with a “twist.” It always felt frustrating, rather than flattering, that someone would only come up with ideas that were built upon the foundation of someone else.