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

You can’t believe everything you hear.

This week, I saw dozens of headlines and viral social posts about an AI country song that reached the top board Country Chart. If a song created with generative AI had actually reached No. 1 in the country music industry, it would have been huge, paradigm-changing news indeed.

I’m talking about “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust, which is the name of an AI-generated “musician.” Meanwhile, as social media users shared the news of an AI country song topping the charts, a human named Morgan Wallen has been the actual artist at the top. board Country Chart. (I reached board for comments, and I’ll update this post if I get any responses.)

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

As is often the case, social media doesn’t have the right story about this. On YouTube, till the time of writing this news, this song has been viewed only 38,944 times.

As someone who grew up in the South and heard Very Of country pop against her will, I can tell you that a lot of it sounds exactly the same. Pop country loves its tropes to be parodied to death, and “Walk My Walk” plays on several common clichés. The song includes rhymes such as “got mud on my jeans” and, ironically, “I was born this way”. Even the song title and the name of the “composer” are extremely generic.

In fact, it’s hard to think of a more clichéd country song title than “Walk My Walk.” And what does Breaking Rust really mean? It’s exactly the kind of rustic-sounding but soulless name you’d expect from a generic AI.

On first listen, at least to my ears, there isn’t much to distinguish this song from any other country or bluegrass pop hit. But this isn’t so much a praise of generic AI as a criticism of the genre. And, of course, if “Walk My Walk” sounds like a real country song, that’s because it was created by an AI audio model trained on countless real country songs, without the artists’ permission or consent, of course. Many artists consider generic AI on an industrial scale to be outright theft and plagiarism.

according to tennesseanThe Breaking Rust songs are credited to Aubiere Rivaldo Taylor, an unknown creator with no online presence.

Whether you like it or not, AI makers aren’t going away. I’ve written about the bizarre phenomenon of AI “actors” before, and you can expect to see more AI-generated songs, movies, books, and slop appearing in your feed from now on and possibly forever.

This article reflects the opinion of the author.

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