Last week, the number one song on the Billboard Country Digital Song sales chart has been “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust, though the song is entirely made by artificial intelligence.
While the song may sound like your typical country ballad with its raspy vocals, off-beat clap, and both lyrics and imagery portraying a gritty country man in a cowboy hat – it’s entirely made by artificial intelligence.
You can listen to the AI-generated song on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, and basically any platform of your choice, though there’s no mention the song was made with AI anywhere and the artist “Breaking Rust” is listed as a real, verified artist.
Things get stranger when you look at the credits to the song(s) by Breaking Rust and you see the name “Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor” listed as the composer and lyricist. A quick search on Spotify reveals another artist with Taylor listed in the credits, “Defbeatsai”, who has what appears to be meme-style songs.
The virality of “Breaking Rust” is likely due to how much it tries to come off as real country music though “Defbeatsai” made songs clearly meant as parody. The songs are titled things like “Balls Deep”, “Kreme Queen”, “Tight and Clean”, and so on. They sound like country music but have absurd lyrics and themes.
Platforms like Spotify have pledged to have protections in place against AI slop overrunning their platform, though accounts like Breaking Rust and even Defbeatsai are listed as legit musicians and creators. There are countless other accounts that are obviously AI-generated.
Furthermore, popular accounts like Breaking Rust have over 2.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and “Walk My Walk” has over 4 million listens already.
It’s clear that platforms aren’t actually protecting real human artists, though Spotify claimed to have removed over 75 million “spam” tracks and have a focus on “improved enforcement of impersonation violations” with supposed “AI disclosures for music with industry-standard credits.”
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