This AI country singer just became Billboard's number one - a worrying sign of things to come

[midian182]

WTF?! Another milestone in the story of AI's takeover has been reached. An entirely AI-created artist has secured the number one spot on Billboard's Country Digital Song Sales chart. It's the first time an AI-generated song has topped the charts, and will undoubtedly encourage an even larger wave of slop as people look to replicate the success.

The AI in question, Breaking Rust, first appeared around October, It managed to top the Billboard chart last week with a song called Walk My Walk.

Breaking Rust's Instagram page doesn't explicitly identify the band as being AI-generated. However, the profile image of a lantern-jawed cowboy is blatantly fake, as are the videos, most of which show the somber cowpoke walking around various locations. There's also an impressive clip (below) of him shoulder pressing – with poor form – what looks like about 450 pounds.

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Breaking Rust (@breakinrust)

What makes it especially obvious that Breaking Rust is AI-generated are the songs themselves. I clicked on several videos on the Instragram page and generally thought they all were all samples from the same song. But no; they just all sound really, really similar.

But despite the very generic sound, Breaking Rust boasts over 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify and has a Verified Artist badge.

Breaking Rust debuted at No. 9 on the Emerging Artists chart on November 1 after generating 1.6 million official US streams, writes Billboard. The publication adds that the project is credited to songwriter Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, who, again, may not even be a real person.

AI artists are far from new – many have gained over 1 million streams on Spotify. The Velvet Sundown, for example, made headlines when, having already released two albums, admitted that their music, images, and backstory were created by AI.

Real musicians have long protested against AI companies using their work to train AI models without permission – over 1,000 released a silent album protesting against a UK law change earlier this year. The success of Breaking Rust highlights a new concern for musicians: competing with AI systems trained on the very music they created.

In June, Deezer said that AI-generated music accounted for just 0.5% of streams on the platform. However, seven out of every 10 streams of these tracks were fraudulent – "listened" to by another AI to generate revenue for their creators.

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This AI country singer just became Billboard's number one – a worrying sign of things to come

 

[redgarl]

This is just the beginning... now just imagine what AI will accomplish in 10 years.

We might be closer to androids then people might think. Robotics will just boom like drones did with the war in Ukraine.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

I wouldn’t have a problem with this if the AI hadn’t been trained on real people’s songs.
That’s stealing plain and simple.

 

[Shear]

I've said it from the beginning. AI art is art. Why? Because if a picture or a song makes you feel something, then it's serving the exact same purpose as art made by a human. That’s the whole point.

That’s also why the purists can’t win this argument. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the idea of human creativity being stripped down to an algorithm any more than the next person. Anyone with common sense would be uneasy about it. But let's be real, we're already screwed. The line has been crossed.

 

[candle86]

I wouldn’t have a problem with this if the AI hadn’t been trained on real people’s songs.
That’s stealing plain and simple.

you realize humans are also trained on other people's music, right? Music inspires other musicians, always has always will, this is no different.

 

[VaRmeNsI]

Given most of the people working in the media are left wing I can't wait to see them all have to go back to working at McDonald's.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

I wouldn’t have a problem with this if the AI hadn’t been trained on real people’s songs.
That’s stealing plain and simple.

Every human is trained on other people's music. What is the difference? To me there is none, humans have been covering and remixing music for as long as humans have existed.

The biggest difference is AI cannot innovate, only copy. So the few people actually making new music will continue to succeed, while the rest that endlessly reiterate songs we've already heard will get beaten by AI, as we're seeing here. Country music has been an incestuous mess for years now, you can't tell a new song from one made 30 years ago.

 

[JMGuy]

I don’t see anything inherently wrong with AI-generated art or music—creativity has always evolved alongside technology. The real issue isn’t that a digital “artist” can top the charts, it’s that the human creators whose work made these systems possible are left out of the equation.

AI music models are trained on countless songs, styles, and performances created by real people—songwriters, vocalists, producers—yet those people rarely see attribution or compensation. If an AI project profits from patterns learned from human work, then the humans behind that source material deserve both credit and a share of the profit.

We need clear, enforceable regulation to make that happen. AI systems should be required to document and respect the copyrighted works they draw from. And arguing fair-use is complete B.S. Only human artists should be able to claim fair use. AI models aren’t creative beings with rights—they’re tools built on the backs of others’ labor.

Innovation isn’t the enemy here—exploitation by those wielding that tech for personal gain is. We can celebrate what technology can do, but not at the expense of the people who made the art that trained it.

Technology shouldn’t be used as an excuse for a human to shortcut the stealing of other human-generated work for their own prestige or profit. They should have to be transparent about how the work was generated and share the gains since their own contribution was only a fraction of the total effort.

 

[JMGuy]

Given most of the people working in the media are left wing I can't wait to see them all have to go back to working at McDonald's.

Spiteful and weak, bro.

Cheering for people to lose their jobs because of their politics isn’t clever—it’s just ugly. You don’t have to like someone’s views to treat them with basic decency. Acting this way just makes you the flip side of the same coin you claim to hate.

Bitterness isn’t courage. All you’re doing is giving your political opposition ammo to prove their point. Be better than that.

 

[Kirby1]

Given most of the people working in the media are left wing I can't wait to see them all have to go back to working at McDonald's.

Are you trying to say that you think most people in the music industry are left wing? The music industry is not "the media".

Seems like Russia needs to update your bot code. Statements are too incoherent.

 

[Primey]

Cringe. Can't take Billboard seriously anymore if they allow AI slop.

 

[godrilla]

Latest Tailor Swift music sounds like Lana Del Rey speaking of mimicking other artists like ai. These artists use Autotune which is a form of ai.

 

[m4a4]

Honestly, couldn't care less if something is AI. As long as it sounds good and has a good melody I'm fine listening to something.

That said, the songs above I don't find special. Not worth adding to my collection.

-------------
Non-AI song that I like where a lot of people wouldn't normally like:

AI song that I like quite a bit more than the base song the melody is "inspired" by:

As long as something tries being a song, I'll call it a song (and art).

 

[vvtunes]

This is just the beginning... now just imagine what AI will accomplish in 10 years.

We might be closer to androids then people might think. Robotics will just boom like drones did with the war in Ukraine.

We (humans) won't last 10 years.

 

[mgilbert]

AI generated songs can't be worse than the overprocessed garbage from the likes of Swift, Beyonce, and Rihanna that passes for music today. And the trash coming from the worlds of hip-hop and rap is even worse. If you want to listen to real music, you have to stick to classical, or classic pop, rock, and country from the sixties, seventies, and early eighties.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Are you trying to say that you think most people in the music industry are left wing?

Well, that's not really some groundbreaking news. One can look at the music industry's response to the Red Lung lockdowns, and the murder of a felon fentanyl addict, and more importantly their hateful censorship of anyone who dared question the narratives provided to see where they lay.

The music industry is not "the media".

Incorrect. Most of the music industry is either owned directly by or have deep ties to other media moguls.

Seems like Russia needs to update your bot code. Statements are too incoherent.

It's so interesting that left leaning people keep rolling out the same "muh russia" excuse they've been using for, what, 15 years now? Going on 20?

Spiteful and weak, bro.

Cheering for people to lose their jobs because of their politics isn’t clever—it’s just ugly. You don’t have to like someone’s views to treat them with basic decency. Acting this way just makes you the flip side of the same coin you claim to hate.

Bitterness isn’t courage. All you’re doing is giving your political opposition ammo to prove their point. Be better than that.

When you spend the better part of 30 years hammering the message that a certain group is responsible for all of society's woes for daring to be born the wrong skin color, or for having the wrong sexual orientation or organs, and then make it legal to discriminate against those people in education, welfare, and employment opportunities, then you are going to breed some deep seated resentment and hatred that results in blatant spite and a desire to see those who pushed such messages suffer.

Turning around and telling those same people to "be the bigger man" comes across as incredibly elitist and tone deaf. Some still carry the scars of what occurred to their great great great grandparents hundreds of years ago, expecting people to ignore what is actively pushed isnt going to accomplish much.

 

[GoldenGoat]

That doesn’t sound like country to me. Maybe like a Maren Morris version of country, which isn’t really country.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Conflicted about this.

On one had, we've had commercial music slop for ages at this point and whatever trends the top 10 is a weird function of marketing, gatekeepers, algorithms and the lowest common denominator and isn't really indicative of much of anything. Songs have had all kinds of machine assistance for ages and some genres of modern music are literally just digital samples clipped together by a "musician".

On the other hand, to paraphrase the now famous quote "everybody gangsta till AI comes for their jobs". Lot of trash talk around AI taking jobs is right now coming from people who feel like they're impervious to the changes AI will bring about. Tradesmen, Skilled Labor etc who think they're irreplaceable (until some illegal or H1B willing to do the same job just as well for a quarter of the pay shows up) and think that AI is coming for those cushy "useless" office jobs and artsy fartsy stuff.

But this is where the battle lines and rules and regs need to get drawn up. "First they came for the liberal fartists, and I wasn't a liberal fartist so I said nothing" applies here. We're close to a machine diagnosing people's health or a robot working electrical/plumbing/carpentry. Which is fine, you can't stop progress.

But people and by extension society does not deal well with massive social change and upheaval, and a lot of people suddenly without work or unable to make ends meet is rarely a formula for the stability and "line goes up" style growth we're all accustomed to. There needs to be a broad, society wide shift toward either retraining or accommodating a much larger pool of unemployed individuals as well as the effect that is going to have on... everything.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

you realize humans are also trained on other people's music, right? Music inspires other musicians, always has always will, this is no different.

It IS different. Humans learn (not just copy) and create new music (if they don't they are sued for stealing).
AI is merely copy and pasting other people's work - which becomes an issue when they then take all the money from that stolen work. Just because AI can average 20 artists in copying them does not make it not stealing.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

Every human is trained on other people's music. What is the difference? To me there is none, humans have been covering and remixing music for as long as humans have existed.

The biggest difference is AI cannot innovate, only copy. So the few people actually making new music will continue to succeed, while the rest that endlessly reiterate songs we've already heard will get beaten by AI, as we're seeing here. Country music has been an incestuous mess for years now, you can't tell a new song from one made 30 years ago.

You answered your own question: "AI cannot innovate, only copy"

Music has been getting worse due to autotune and large labels pushing the same safe sounds, but AI is next level copy and paste.

The problem with your prediction that the few people actually making new music will continue to succeed is that AI will train on any new songs as they come out making any innovation last about a week.

 

[VitalyT]

What are not far off before AI is capable of generating interesting stories and then produce realistic movies from them. The sheer number of people this will see going unemployed is frightening to even think about.

Try to figure out the proportion of world-wide disaster the AI is about to unleash, before the world wakes up to push back for real.

The AI has the potential to make over 50% of the world population redundant in incredibly short span of time, in fact so short, people will have no chance to adapt to the situation, and the social discord will be on the scale exceeding WW-II.

 

[JMGuy]

AI generated songs can't be worse than the overprocessed garbage from the likes of Swift, Beyonce, and Rihanna that passes for music today. And the trash coming from the worlds of hip-hop and rap is even worse. If you want to listen to real music, you have to stick to classical, or classic pop, rock, and country from the sixties, seventies, and early eighties.

My personal musical tastes generally agree with yours.

But what exactly are you achieving with this trolling commentary exactly? I mean, aside from advertising your own limited musical tastes, how does trashing what other people like add value to any conversation?

 

[Username00]

If androids dream of electric sheep, maybe this is the music for them. I do wonder how many of those "listeners" are actual humans though....

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

Conflicted about this.

On one had, we've had commercial music slop for ages at this point and whatever trends the top 10 is a weird function of marketing, gatekeepers, algorithms and the lowest common denominator and isn't really indicative of much of anything. Songs have had all kinds of machine assistance for ages and some genres of modern music are literally just digital samples clipped together by a "musician".

On the other hand, to paraphrase the now famous quote "everybody gangsta till AI comes for their jobs". Lot of trash talk around AI taking jobs is right now coming from people who feel like they're impervious to the changes AI will bring about. Tradesmen, Skilled Labor etc who think they're irreplaceable (until some illegal or H1B willing to do the same job just as well for a quarter of the pay shows up) and think that AI is coming for those cushy "useless" office jobs and artsy fartsy stuff.

But this is where the battle lines and rules and regs need to get drawn up. "First they came for the liberal fartists, and I wasn't a liberal fartist so I said nothing" applies here. We're close to a machine diagnosing people's health or a robot working electrical/plumbing/carpentry. Which is fine, you can't stop progress.

But people and by extension society does not deal well with massive social change and upheaval, and a lot of people suddenly without work or unable to make ends meet is rarely a formula for the stability and "line goes up" style growth we're all accustomed to. There needs to be a broad, society wide shift toward either retraining or accommodating a much larger pool of unemployed individuals as well as the effect that is going to have on... everything.

There's a difference. The song wasn't just spontaneously generated by AI. Someone spent a good amount of time to make this and many other songs. It's probably not somebody with any talent for singing/writing music. But they know what sounds catchy and what they like to listen to. So will this replace some people's jobs? Yes, BUT, it will be someone more innovative with the ability to use great tools to be more productive than modern musicians.

Your premise was "we've had commercial music slop for ages" because "songs have had all kinds of machine assistance for ages". This is just someone else with even better machine assistance. It's not like the most "talented" people can't do the same. They should be able to make better music with AI, right?

 

[Rock Dirty]

Given most of the people working in the media are left wing I can't wait to see them all have to go back to working at McDonald's.

NP