Meet the artists who don’t exist | Opinion - The Tennessean

The music industry is currently grappling with the emergence of AI-generated artists that are actively disguised as human performers. These synthetic acts, including the singer Sienna Rose and the band The Velvet Sundown, have reached significant popularity on streaming platforms while maintaining a facade of human identity.

What happened

Sienna Rose, a persona boasting over 720,000 monthly listeners, is entirely artificial; her name, face, and music are products of AI. Despite the team behind her attempting to portray her as a real person through social media interactions, the character exhibits several technical inconsistencies. These include unnatural face distortions and shifting physical features in videos. Furthermore, the account's output of 45 tracks in a single month far exceeds human capacity, and streaming detection tools have frequently flagged her music as inhuman.

Similarly, the project known as The Velvet Sundown initially presented itself as a four-member psychedelic-rock band. The group used consistent imagery of the band members, complete with long hair and half-smiles, though early promotional photos contained visual artifacts such as unnaturally shaped hands. After facing months of public scrutiny and accusations regarding their authenticity, the project eventually updated its Spotify profile to acknowledge its nature as a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction.

These incidents highlight a growing trend where AI-generated content is being used to capture market share on streaming services. While proponents argue that AI democratizes music creation, critics view the practice as exploitative, noting that AI models are trained on human-produced music without consent. Additionally, these projects face legal hurdles, as a March 2025 U.S. Court of Appeals ruling determined that works created entirely by AI are ineligible for copyright protection, limiting the ability of their creators to license or sell the content.