A band called The Velvet Sundown has launched a debut album on Spotify, and the group has quickly racked up over a million listeners. And though the group's aesthetic and sound seem lifted out of the Sunset Strip in the '60s or '70s, the reality is a little different.

Frelon said he created The Velvet Sundown tracks using the generative-AI tool Suno before posting them on Spotify, where the band now has more than a million monthly listeners. Case settled, then. But apparently not.

Faced with growing criticism, the band defended themselves on their X account Velvet Sundown (The Real Band Not The AI Band): “Absolutely crazy that so-called ‘journalists’ keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that The Velvet Sundown is ‘AI-generated’ with zero evidence.”