Avenged Sevenfold made headlines back in February when their podcast Trax was targeted by an alleged AI deepfake. Turns out that “deepfake” wasn’t so deep.
In a new interview with Rock Feed, frontman M. Shadows says he was behind the stunt. To briefly recap: The stunt involved uploading a bogus Trax episode where Shadows is heard telling fans A7X had to pull out of some high-profile festival appearances due to issues with their upcoming album. Shadows says he was able to pull this off with the help of someone that works on the podcast. However, he had this person promise not to tell anyone in management or promoters of the aforementioned festivals.
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Shadows said, “The day that it went down, I was in Mexico and I’m watching this go down. And my phone is blowing up … And it’s my voice. And people are calling [management and the promoters], going, ‘You guys are so lame for letting the band…’ And then [podcast producer] Mark [Wakefield] said, ‘What are you talking about?’” (At the time, Shadows played dumb and said via Twitter, “Literally walking in the streets of Mexico and listening to this. What the actual f-ck… NOT ME!” He later added in response to a tweet, “Yikes! This is NOT TRUE. We are still playing. Getting to the bottom of this.”)
The stunt utilized ChatGPT and seems like it was a way to show how easy it is to fool someone with the help of AI. Shadows said, ” … The whole thing was, like, ‘We don’t need to be a real person. You will be fooled. You will feel something. And we can fool you just by some bad actor that’s got this in the wrong hands.’”
A7X’s new album Life Is But A Dream… comes out tomorrow (June 2.) It’s available for pre-save/pre-order here, with special album-themed merch available at A7Xworld.com.
