AI and the badge of authenticity
As AI bands become the norm, they use authenticity signifiers to create cultural clout. How many fans will believe they're real, and how many won't care that they're not?
In case you haven’t heard yet, recent viral hitmakers The Velvet Sundown aren’t a real band. What’s interesting about this AI band is their appropriation of many signifiers of authenticity. They’re an all guy folk-rock group with a warm vintage 1970s ambience. There are guitars, beards and AI-softened denim. Song titles include Dust On The Wind, End The Pain and Where The Rebels Meet.
These superficial aesthetic choices are connected to a profound and meaningful history in Western music culture. Real rock music is full of raw, human emotion. Real folk music has driven actual revolutions. This music carries power and connects with humanity through generations. It’s telling that AI artists are finding success with the most reputedly “authentic” genres of music. People almost expect pop to be manufactured by machines, but folk-rock? Who would have suspected that?
Stop The AI Slop
I support the theory that there will be a backlash to the banal, puréed qualities inherent to AI art and music with a new romanticism and zeal for humanity and human creations. So when I was sent a link to a music video called “Stop The AI Slop” I clicked.
It begins with some diverse, AI-smoothed talking heads preaching that we must “Stop the AI Slop” then, in scenes reminiscent of The Blob, snotty globules chase and envelope their running human prey. I chuckled then stopped watching after a minute because AI art is like that. There’s not enough humanity in it to sustain interest and it tends towards cliché. I liked the message but was confused by it’s hypocrisy. What was this all about? Was it some kind of AI-generated spam music video made entirely without human intervention?
I clicked on another video from the channel, uploaded in June, “Bubble Brain Helmet Girl”. This one blatantly steals imagery from the artist-driven 3D/AI project from French production company Meat Dept. for Igorrr’s latest song ADHD. They’re not just appropriating artists through AI but through actually copying subject matter.
Arika and the Amoebas have a real Bandcamp page. It features a wall of pulpy, faux vintage album covers stretching back to their first upload in April 2025. Their Bandcamp bio plays up to the idea that this is a real band. “Arika & The Amoebas haunt rock’s uncanny valley. Arika fronts every song and video.” This is in stark contradiction to their YouTube profile which clearly states otherwise.
“Arika & The Amoebas is an independent music, video, and art project—an ongoing attempt to manifest a personal vision that couldn’t exist through conventional channels. I’m a lifelong artist with a Master’s in Fine Art: a painter, sculptor, digital painter, writer, musician, videographer, and now, AI artist… I make it all with a laptop, a phone, my voice, some acting, and persistence. I am not Arika [she’s my creation], and I don’t sing or play the instruments you hear… I write all my lyrics, and everything is produced independently.”
As suspected it’s completely AI-generated art and music, but so far it appears there is a human being behind it. It’s not AI-driven AI. This is a kind of creative act, but to what end?
The bio states that “I write all my lyrics” so I explored them in search of answers. Early Arika and the Ameobas songs follow B-movie themes with songs like Surfing Cyborg Girl (Cuz she's a surfing cyborg girl / A gnarly tubular girl), Martian Attack and Bride of Frankenstein. Then there’s a distinct shift with Tears for Billionaires, when the movie monster becomes the tech bros.
I'm weeping tears for billionaires
Bawling my eyes out for scum
Game The System and F The Algo follow suit. Game The System sounds like it could be the artists’ own playbook:
Give the people what they want
Feed the lowest common denominator
Serve them derivative pablum pap
Market tested milk-toast drivel
Game the system
Rig the algorithm
Whether these emotions are genuine or not, the artist is using signifiers of authenticity (what could be more human than hating AI and the tech bros?) along with the punk and metal stylings of the music to lend their project cultural clout.
Interestingly, YouTube recently changed their monetisation policy wording around AI and authenticity. Content that is mass-produced or repetitive, which viewers often consider to be spam, cannot be monetised on YouTube. The term “repetitious content” has now been changed to to “inauthentic content”. A much more ambigous term, and one which they clarify does allow the use of AI as long as it is disclosed as such. So YouTube thinks some AI is authentic.
Arika and the Amoebas clearly disclose that their work is AI content below every video and in their bio. The channel has 1.2k subscribers on YouTube but it only launched two months ago. That’s not bad. What’s more, people are actually buying their music on Bandcamp.
“This is not ‘music,’ it’s ‘instant music’”
Arika is not the first musician, cynical of the current tech-driven music system, to rebel against it by manipulating it to work in their favour.
Ever heard the music of Callous Humane? Or maybe Calvinistic Dust? It’s more likely you’ll have heard of North Carolina musician Michael Smith who hit headlines last year for stealing $10 million in royalties through AI-generated songs.
Initially Michael wrote his own music, uploaded it to the streaming platforms, then artificially inflated their play counts by creating thousands of “bot accounts” which would play his tracks over and over, continuously. At its peak, Smith’s operation allegedly had “as many as 10,000 active bot accounts” running.
But when he kept being detected by the anti-fraud systems on these platforms he realised he needed to increase the volume of tracks to keep flying under the radar.
Smith enlisted an AI company who supplied him with 1,000-10,000 songs per month, giving him the full IP rights to the tracks. In turn, Smith provided the AI company with metadata and the “greater of $2,000 or 15% of the streaming revenue” generated from the AI songs.
The AI company’s CEO emailed Smith saying: “Keep in mind what we’re doing… this is not ‘music,’ it’s ‘instant music’ ;)”
A broken system
To me this is a sad story. Smith started out as a real musician trying to make it in streaming. The process of doing PR for any music release involves trying to get playlisted. It can take months. There are services like Submithub and musosoup which claim to help automate this process but it’s still a slog. We found that musosoup (report below) basically works essentially like payola. You submit your release to an unknown selection of curators and influencers, many of which are spam accounts, then they offer you paid placement.
In the music world, it’s extremely difficult to get your music heard without spending a lot of money to promote the hell out of your work. For independent artists, PR and plugging typically costs many times more than what you’ll actually make from selling your music.
When Michael Smith found he couldn’t make a living from his music, he saw a way to use his skills to game the system for himself. If found guilty, he has committed fraud, but it’s the streaming platforms who created this system, who reward this behaviour and who continue to go unpunished themselves.
Spotify promotes banal background music which has no rights holders, therefore no-one to pay out to. They refer to it internally as “Perfect Fit Content”(explosively uncovered by Liz Pelly in Harper’s in January this year). This maximises their own profits and minimises payments to real artists.
There has always been bland and clichéd popular music, but it has never threatened to overwhelm the industry so completely as AI music does. The popularity of this new, tech-driven muzak is a sad symptom of the way music has become wallpaper for many people, a background decoration rather than a central human experience.
Navigating the sea of slop
In this sea of AI and human-made musical slop the real question is, who’s listening and do they even care how it was made?
While Spotify is known to promote inoffensive drivel to the top of its playlists, Arika and the Ameobas’ YouTube videos are full of supportive comments, presumably from real human beings.
“I have been an artist over 45 years and enjoy all aspects of it, this is the new stuff and truly enjoy it. Keep up the good work.”
“Surreal performance punk. This is so refreshing, engaging, and interesting.”
”The haters are incapable of making art - only criticizing something they do not understand…. Run...you cannot escape the future of art.”
Not only do these people like the music, they believe in Arika as an artist challenging our perceptions of what it means to create art. This is in stark contrast to my personal experience of listening to AI music, perfectly articulated by Saeed Saeed writing in The National recently about The Velvet Sundown:
“After 20 songs of this, the question stops being about whether they are real and more about why they don’t make me feel anything?”
Pulp have their own tounge-in-cheek take on AI-generated music videos in their recent video for Spike Island, in which they dabble in AI with dismal results. The take home message is that the photos they used to feed the video prompts were created by real artists Rankin and Donald Milne, “Human Intelligence at it’s best.”
It takes all sorts, the old saying goes. There are passive listeners who are happy with generic background music, there are others for whom clichéd ideas are novel, but there will always be a devoted group who champion original human art and music.
If AI-generated content continues to flood into the platforms where we listen to music, the segregation between these groups will become more intense. Those platforms will be dominated by pedestrian music while human music lovers will find their sounds elsewhere, on Bandcamp and other niche music sites, through people, in the real world. The subculture will find a new space to thrive in.
Listening to music can be a transformative experience, deeply connected to our bodies, our souls, our communities and our culture. Those who know music’s true power will always fight to make it a central part of their life. It doesn’t matter what kind of wallpaper we see everywhere, real art will always command our attention and stand proudly in the middle of the room.
Thanks for making the effort to think all this through! I guess it’s the final phase of the enshittification of streaming. Maybe it will finally drive us all back to genuine performance in the same physical space? Have you seen anyone working on self-destroying digital media with a limited listen count like analogue media used to be. Maybe there’s a kickstarter there…