Hope all of you are enjoying your weekend. I know that folks in Japan just celebrated their annual Tanabata festival on July 7th with all those wishes written on coloured strips of paper to be tied up on tree branches. So, the summer is truly here. Another sign of summer in Japan? Mysteries and scary stories to bring chills to listeners to allay some of that torrid heat.
I may have one mystery here on "Kayo Kyoku Plus", and no it's not another APB for a Lostwave song. Perhaps a few weeks ago, I discovered this freshly-posted YouTube video of an aidoru group named I Doll Raspberry with their cheery summery tune "Amai Natsu Melody" (Sweet Summer Melody). There are four minutes exactly in this one and it starts abruptly and ends just as abruptly as if we didn't get the complete tune, but obviously four minutes are more than enough to hear that seasonally happy song.
There are other songs by them on the YouTube "I Doll Raspberry ~ Topic" channel but I could find nothing about this group elsewhere on the Net aside from their albums and singles available on the Boomplay platform. Nothing on their history, membership and songwriters. If anyone out there does know something about these ladies, please let me know.
I am near 100% certain that this song, and the entire group, is AI-generated.
ReplyDelete1. From what I've seen, that group released a huge amount of songs from 14 June to 5 July this year, often releasing multiple songs per day (5 songs released on 4 July alone, with 4 songs released both on 3 July AND 5 July?! 14 June batch alone having ~20 songs?!) There is no way even a huge company would have been able to churn out that many songs even if we assume that group has been in training for a while until debut. Which leads us further...
2. How come are there absolutely no mentions of that group elsewhere?! Not even a grainy live recording from a 10yo smartphone?! (And given that this is an aidoru group, that they never performed live is sus especially with so many songs released) In fact, the only two mentions of I Doll Raspberry on twitter are a link to this very article and some Japanese user mentioning that they too suspect it's AI.
2.5. And for that matter: when I tried going through various possible katakana combinations in search of the group, all that showed up was a completely unrelated 90s group, ラズベリー.
And now, for the most blatant evidence...
3. Look at some of the cover photos. For example, the most recent song, "Soar Into the Future". Pay attention to some of the members' hands being extremely distorted and some having atypical number of fingers (and even if we assume the second girl from the right is meant to have polidactyly, one of the fingers is very blatantly distorted in a way only AI would do.) That the song you featured there has weird clipping also serves as sufficient evidence.
Speaking of which: using public AI models to generate either music or images is, tbh, really immoral. Almost all of these models are built on data obtained from artists' consent.
Hello, Yurihan. Yeah, the lack of information about this group and that photo of them had me wondering if they were real at all.
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