The Velvet Sundown: Artificial intelligence also composes Spotify hits.

The debate about the limits of artificial intelligence has been on the agenda for a couple of years, but it always manages to raise new questions. It's often argued that there are things that technology can't replace, as if they were too human: art is one of them. But in 2025, what does it mean to be an artist?

The limits were certainly pushed after what recently happened with The Velvet Sundown , a musical band followed by 1.1 million people on Spotify , which admitted to having been generated entirely by artificial intelligence (AI).

Within a few weeks of existence, this group with a seventies aesthetic rose to sudden fame on Spotify, where they've released two albums so far this year. However, it wasn't just the songs that were created by AI, but also the people who make up the band, their faces, and even their origin story.

This might seem redundant, but it isn't. AI is no longer limited to creating individual actions—a single song—but goes further: it composes tailor-made worlds to ensure the success of its creations.

The French philosopher Éric Sadin anticipated a few years ago that artificial intelligence establishes a new regime of vision and interpretation of reality , a process of which art must be aware in order to reinvent its role. How should we think of The Velvet Sundown today? It's too pretentious to present it as a contemporary artist, and yet it doesn't close itself off from other questions. Is the prompt that drove its birth an artistic fact in itself? At the same time, does it subrogate a commercial motive? And, above all: can we deny its artistic character if more than a million people are moved by its songs?

Artificial intelligence brings us back to a question we think is old but is now renewed: what is art, and what makes it art? Perhaps it's time to debate less about whether AI can replace humanity, and more about how humanity is redefined in the face of these new forms of creation.