Is it true that for the first time in history there was a concert in the United States where a robot sang?

In June 2024, news spread on the Internet that an unusual show took place in California: there was a robot on stage who sang songs and rapped. We have verified the accuracy of such publications.

In mid-June, Facebook users began share news of the first ever concert at which a robot developed by TechFusion Dynamics performed. Some publications received thousands of likes and reposts. The authors of the posts cited a lot details - for example, that the companies TechFusion Dynamics, Apple and OpenAI participated in the creation of the robot, the robot communicated with the public “in perfect English with a slight British accent” and “reacted to changes in the mood of the public.” Also users shared impressions of actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Jessica Chastain, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, head of the HyperSound startup Jane Synthesis and artificial intelligence specialist Ilon Makedonsky who attended the performance.

IN comments Attitudes to the news were divided. Alone reacted negative (“Well, a star to all the stars who sing with their mouths? Athletes get ready?” and “Disgusting, it would be better if robots were sent to war instead of men”), others welcomed such innovations in the field of artificial intelligence (“Cool! I wonder when robots will replace artists who have left our world, such as Michael Jackson!” and “Soon we will go not to concerts of our favorite artists, but to concerts of our favorite robots. On the one hand, this is sad, but on the other, this is progress, and not necessarily negative”). The spread of the news was not limited to Facebook: similar publications can be found on Telegram, X, Instagram, "VKontakte", LiveJournal and some Media.

The exact location of the concert varies from one post to another. Some users claimthat it took place in Silicon Valley (as it is mistakenly called Silicon Valley in the state of California due to the similarity of the English words silicon, that is, “silicon”, and silicone, “silicon”). In others publications The location of the show is even indicated as a certain Selection Valley in San Francisco. For the query “Selection Valley” in Russian and English, Google Maps did not return a single result.

Judging by the photographs accompanying the posts, the concert took place in a large stadium with at least two tiers and red-orange seats. There are about 15 sports arenas in Silicon Valley, but only two of them are visually similar to the place from the pictures: “Sanford Stadium" And Levi's Stadium. There is no information about the innovative show on the official websites of both venues.

A search for news about a concert given by a robot in English yielded no more than a dozen results: two publications on LinkedIn (1 And 2), one post on social networks X And Instagram, note on the portal Newo.ai and on the news portal Ministry of Information and Communications of Vietnam. Probably, if such an event really took place in the United States, the largest American and international media would have written about it, but they completely ignored the news.

Many publications indicate that people took part in the creation of the robot: TechFusion Dynamics, Apple And OpenAI. However, there are no press releases about the concert on the official websites of these companies. Other bloggers share quotes from celebrities who allegedly attended the performance, but in verified accounts DiCaprio, Chastain And Zuckerberg There are no posts on this topic on social networks. And two more people mentioned in the viral news - Jane Synthesis and Elon the Great -, judging by the results of a Google search, simply do not exist.

It is also strange that only four photographs can be found on the Internet, supposedly taken during the concert. It is unlikely that with the number of spectators captured in the viral footage, no one published a photo or video of what was happening on social networks. Using the service AI or Not To recognize images created by artificial intelligence, we checked four photos from news posts. The algorithm determined that, with a high degree of probability, they were all generated by a neural network.

The earliest post we found about the show was a community post Techsol on Facebook, published on June 12 at 10:01 Moscow time. Judging by the profile description, he belongs to a company that sells custom chatbots and regularly publishes news about artificial intelligence and AI-generated content on its social network page. In the comments to post Techsol one of the users wrote about the concert: “Generated by a chatbot, don’t think what’s real. But the future is already here,” to which the author of the publication replied: “Yes, it was generated by a chatbot, but who said that fantasy cannot become reality?” And in response to another comment he added: “People tend to believe in any information, especially if it looks plausible. Maybe this is a reason to think about how easy it is to manipulate perception, and learn to be more discerning?”

Thus, the news about the first concert in history given by a robot is the result of the work of generative artificial intelligence: both text and images were created by a neural network.

Cover photo: Facebook

Not true

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