The Quebec man who pranked journalists and music fans by saying he was behind a wildly successful AI band has revealed his identity as web platform safety and policy issues expert Tim Boucher.
Speaking on video from his workspace in a rural area outside Quebec City, Boucher told CBC News Wednesday that the reality-blurring prank was partly motivated by revenge for the five years he worked as a content moderator.
“When you’re the one that has to deal with all the fighting and the fakery and just all of the garbage that humans can come up with, it changes how you look at the world,” he said.
Last month, Boucher claimed he created the Velvet Sundown, a ’70s-inspired “band” that had about 300,000 monthly listeners at the time and was drawing attention for appearing to use AI. He set up an X account purporting to represent the band and fielded media requests.
Using the pseudonym Andrew Frelon — frelon being the French word for hornet — he first said the band was made up of real humans, then “admitted” it was AI, then said he had nothing to do with it at all. The Velvet Sundown now has nearly 1.5 million monthly listeners and its creator remains a mystery.
“I want to be able to show people a bit of what that’s like — this feeling of having to determine what’s real, and having to determine is this right or is this wrong, or having to make all these really weird decisions that for some reason are your problem, or your responsibility,” Boucher told CBC News.
Boucher has previously been in the news for publishing novels using AI and proposing an AI bill of rights. He also has a history of public pranks, having helped create a fake company and a fake art movement.
He insisted on using a pseudonym when he spoke to CBC News three weeks ago, in part because he says he was bombarded with messages from people telling him to kill himself over the Velvet Sundown experiment. He says those messages have tapered off significantly.
He says he also hopes to deepen the “convoluted” conversation that has come out of his experiment.
“I realized that there’s a limit of the depth that we can go to if I’m not willing to expose myself, too, and to be vulnerable,” he said.
The truth is out there
The experiment has sparked conversations about the impact of AI and artificial streaming on music platforms, while spawning a miniature industry around the mysterious band.
Countless AI artists with identical or similar names to the Velvet Sundown have popped up on Spotify. On YouTube, people have made videos using band’s songs, dissecting the controversy, creating similar AI bands and, in one case, making an eerily realistic fake documentary.
At times, it’s difficult to parse who is involved with the original Velvet Sundown, who is trying to capitalize on its success and who is simply toying with the absurdity of it all.
The Velvet Sundown’s official social media accounts have remained quiet, and have not responded to CBC News’s requests for comment.
Two men behind velvetsundownmusic.com, one of whom says he’s Canadian and lives part-time in Vancouver, told CBC News they are part of a network of people behind the Velvet Sundown, but declined to answer specific questions about the operation. The site is selling Velvet Sundown-branded merchandise but is not linked to the band’s official Spotify or social media accounts.
Meanwhile Vinyl Group, which owns Rolling Stone Australia and other music outlets, bought velvetsundown.com as a condemnation of AI trickery, with an expressed goal to “expose the fakes.”
Rolling Stone Australia editor in chief Neil Griffiths told CBC News he’s found the Velvet Sundown experiment both “fascinating” and “terrifying” and says the new website will be a hub for conversations and investigations about AI and art.
Spotify has not responded to CBC News’s requests for comment.
Boucher wants people to be vigilant
Boucher’s X account, which he initially claimed was run by the band, turned to absurd farewell messages mid week, including AI-generated images of the band members walking into Narnia, being abducted by a UFO and going to heaven.
He also posted a collection of public domain Velvet Sundown T-shirt designs, playing on one of the biggest questions raised by the spectacle: who has the rights to a band that no one will claim ownership of?
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Many have suspected he’s behind the band after all, a theory Boucher played into with a satirical blog post before going public with his real name in a lengthy blog post entitled The True Confessions of Andrew Frelon.
He maintains he has nothing to do with the Velvet Sundown and has been working to crack the case himself.
In the meantime, Boucher says he hopes the experiment encourages people to be more vigilant about verifying things they see — and people they encounter — online.
“I want people to be encouraged and to learn on their own, to share and to have those conversations,” he said.
“In a way, it’s too bad that sometimes the best way to make those conversations is to trick people in the wild. But I think if you can do that, and then you can expose the trick, there can be a lot of value in that.”
