Fact check: Did an AI country song reach No. 1 on Billboard?

You can’t believe everything you hear.

This week I’ve seen dozens of headlines and viral social media posts about a country song by AI that has reached the top of the chart. Billboard country maps. If a song created with generative AI had truly reached number 1 in the country music world, that would indeed be huge, paradigm-shifting news.

I’m talking about “Walk My Walk” from Breaking Rust, the name of an AI-generated “musician.” Meanwhile, while social media users were breathlessly sharing news of AI’s country song topping the chart, a human being named Morgan Wallen was the real artist topping the chart. Billboard table of countries. (I contacted Billboard to comment, and I will update this post if I receive a response.)

So what’s going on? Technically, “Walk My Walk” took the top spot on the chart. A chart. Specifically, the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart. However, as any music listener can tell you, there aren’t many people buying digital copies of singles anymore. On Spotify’s Country Top 50 chart, Breaking Rust is nowhere to be found, even after all the media coverage last week.

As is often the case, social media doesn’t really talk about the story on this. On YouTube, the song has a measly 38,944 views, as of this writing.

Growing up in the South and listening a lot of country pop against his will, I can tell you that a lot of these songs sound exactly the same. Pop country loves its tropes and has been parodied to death, and “Walk My Walk” touches on many of the usual clichés. The lyrics include poetry like “I’ve got mud on my jeans” and, ironically, “I was born this way.” Even the song title and the name of the “musician” are painfully generic.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a more hackneyed country song title than “Walk My Walk,” and what does Breaking Rust really mean? It’s exactly the kind of country-sounding but soulless name you’d expect from generative AI.

Upon first listen, there isn’t much that sets this song apart from another pop country or Bluegrass hit, at least to my ears. But this is not so much a praise of generative AI as a critique of the genre. And of course, if “Walk My Walk” sounds like a real country song, that’s because it was surely created by an AI audio model trained on countless real country songs, without the artists’ permission or consent. Many artists view generative AI as pure theft and plagiarism, on an industrial scale.

According to The Tennesseanthe songs on Breaking Rust are attributed to Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, an unknown creator with no online presence.

Like it or not, AI creators are not going away. I’ve written before about the bizarre phenomenon of AI “actors,” and you can expect more AI-generated songs, movies, books, and slops to appear in your feeds from now on, and maybe forever.

This article reflects the opinion of the author.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, filed a lawsuit in April against OpenAI, alleging that it violated Ziff Davis’ copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.