AI will take your job. We all have likely heard something like this in the past few months. Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, TCS, have all laid off thousands of workers already. Recently, SaaS giant Atlassian said that it was firing 10 per cent of its workforce to fund further AI investment. While Meta is reportedly planning to cut over 15,000 jobs due to mounting AI costs. Now, the situation may seem bleak, but one peculiar case says something different – AI helped them create new jobs.
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The story begins with a Japanese metal band called Neon Oni. The band first surfaced online in mid-2025. They uploaded their first video on YouTube on August 14, 2025, titled, “dont forget ur mask.”
Within weeks, the band went viral, users seemed to be loving their music. If you browse through comments on their YouTube channel, you’ll find users saying, “Every song I’ve heard from this band is a 10/10 omg” and “you just know they’re gonna get big. They’re too good not to.”
But something seemed off. Neon Oni was a band that claimed it was based in Japan. However, fans couldn’t find any presence of the artists anywhere in the real-world. No performances, no interviews, no individual presence on social media either.
As it turns out, there was no real-world presence, because Neon Oni wasn’t real to begin with. It was created by a person, likely based in Europe, with a tool called Suno AI.
After fans started exposing this AI-generated band, the creator decided to do something different. Instead of shutting down the project, they went on to hire 7 human artists to run Neon Oni on stage.
The creator said, as quoted by awesomeagents.ai, “In an age where AI is taking everyone’s jobs, this has actually created jobs. It’s done the complete opposite.”
The band’s creator seems to be quite proud that he made 7 jobs for artists, irrespective of the fact that he was exposed for trying to make an AI-only band to begin with.
Neon Oni’s Spotify description now states that it is a “metal band from the machine, made real for the fans” – proudly accepting that the origins of this group was actually AI.
And the creator isn’t stopping there. The seven humans who have been signed up to run Neon Oni will be performing live, with six concerts planned till April this year. The description adds that the band “transforms a digital existence into a real, physical live act, not replacing what it was, but expanding what it can be.”
The band states that it donates its earnings to support Japanese musicians.
The creator used Suno AI to generate songs for Neon Oni. Suno AI is an audio-generation AI tool, released in December 2023. In November 2025, the company reached a deal with the Warner Music Group (WMG) to train its models on its catalogue. This was part of a $500 million dollar lawsuit settlement.
After Neon Oni’s release, music analysts were able to notice patterns in songs, which had initially raised suspicions that the music was generated by AI.
Neon Oni currently has over 78,000 monthly Spotify users and its top track, ‘SATORi SEDAi,’ has over 1.2 million streams on the platform. The band also have over 14,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Neon Oni is not the first AI-generated band or artist. Previously, AI-generated artists, such as Velvet Sundown and Xania Monet, have gone viral online. And this is only part of the picture. Platforms such as Spotify are flooded with AI-generated music, as tools like Suno AI become more accessible.
In 2025, Spotify removed 75 million AI-generated spam tracks from the platform. The company’s actual music catalogue with human-made songs stands at 100 million. Spotify stated at the time, “Spam tactics have become easier to exploit as AI tools make it easier for anyone to generate large volumes of music.”
Since then, generating music has become even easier, with even Google’s Gemini supporting audio generation. And music is not the only field affected by this “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content.
AI-generated videos go viral on social media, including platforms like YouTube. AI slop channels such as Bandar Apna Dost is said to have made $4.25 million (roughly Rs 35 crore) with over 2.4 billion views. However, YouTube has cracked down on such channels who upload only AI slop.
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