Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, in an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Well, according to a recent article in The Atlantic, there's a new hit band, but it doesn't really exist.

Velvet Sundown got a million hits on Spotify before the wider public realized that they were completely generated by

AI. Now, manufactured musical acts are of course nothing new, but at least the boy bands of the 90s

and you remember the monkeys, they were at least made up of dancing, singing, living human beings.

Velvet Sundown's two albums have a kind of coffee house vibe. Band photos, history, and song

lyrics can all be found online for this group that doesn't really exist. And apparently they even

have a social media strategy. When my colleague Tim Padgett shared the Atlantic article online,

the band liked his post. And one of their own social media posts reads this way, quote,

they said we're not real. Well, maybe you aren't either, end quote. Now, could there be a better

encapsulation of our moment than this story, disembodied art, music without a musician,

and will anyone even care as long as they like it? Back in 1999, the film The Matrix told a dystopian

tale of an ordinary man that discovered his entire world is an illusion, manufactured by

artificially intelligent robots. And a big part of that story is that humans are easily

captive because of their addiction to ease and escape. In 2021, the star of that film, as well as all the Matrix sequels, Keanu Reeves,

had dinner with some friends whose teenage daughters had never seen the film.

When he explained the plot to them, the girls were quite puzzled.

Why would anyone want to leave the illusion?

One of them even said, who cares if it's real?

Reeves replied to them was, that's awesome.

No, it's actually terrifying, and it should be terrifying to the person who starred in the movie.

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