An AI Artist Has Three Songs in Spotify Viral 50 and Seemingly Fooled Selena Gomez

Sienna Rose, an AI account that released 10 albums between September and December of last year, has placed three songs on Spotify’s Viral 50 — USA playlist, with one track seemingly fooling Selena Gomez.

The Sienna Rose avatar started September as a pale redhead with an acoustic guitar, soon morphed into a brunette, and found viral success by looking like a Black woman singing R&B. The human(s) behind it scrubbed old albums from Spotify, but the evidence remains on platforms such as Tidal (see above).

The account currently has 2.7 million monthly Spotify listeners, but if this story follows the same path as AI artists The Velvet Sundown and Xania Monet, that number will drop as more people learn she’s not human. As Rolling Stone points out, Selena Gomez initially used the Rose song “Where Your Warmth Begins” as background for an Instagram post. However, Gomez or her team removed the track this week around the same time that questions surfaced about Rose’s IRL existence.

The Viral 50 used to be a launchpad for emerging artists, but has recently become a home for emergent AI. The prompt performer Breaking Rust, which released the country don’t-tread-on-me slop “Walk My Walk,” has spent weeks on the playlist.

Just this week Bandcamp made the decision to ban all music generated by AI. For more on AI slop-mongers, check out my colleague Kiana Fitzgerald’s excellent reported piece, “The Grifters, Dreamers, and Robots Behind AI-Generated Music.”