Though they’re not yet dominating the charts, disturbingly realistic AI songs are slowly but surely creeping into our headphones - and you may even be listening to them without realizing what you’re hearing. Smuggled into popular playlists and hidden in plain sight among authentic, well-known tracks, AI-generated artists with fake photos, ChatGPT-generated biographies and no genuine fans to speak of are picking up hundreds of thousands of streams.

One such artist is The Velvet Sundown, a band with almost 350,000 monthly Spotify listeners but no discernible online presence or social media accounts. (“There’s not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed,” as one Redditor put it.) While we can’t confirm that the band’s music is AI-generated, a glance at their artist image and bio should be enough to persuade even the least skeptical observer.

“The Velvet Sundown don’t just play music — they conjure worlds,” reads the group’s Spotify profile, which we’re about 99% certain has been authored by ChatGPT. “Somewhere between the ghost of Laurel Canyon and the echo of a Berlin warehouse, this four-piece band bends time, fusing 1970s psychedelic textures with cinematic alt-pop and dreamy analog soul.”

The biography tellingly states that the band’s music “feels like a hallucination you want to stay lost in,” their live shows playing like “lucid dreams” and their albums “unfolding like lost soundtracks to films that were never made”. There’s even a seemingly bogus quote from Billboard rounding things off, claiming that the band “sound like the memory of something you never lived, and somehow make it feel real”.