A US country artist called Breaking Rust recently released a song called “Walk My Walk.” In just under a month, it has had more than 3 million streams on Spotify.
It’s been at the top of Billboard’s “Country Digital Song Sales” for weeks, and Breaking Rust has more than 2.3 million monthly listeners.
But “Walk My Walk” is just another song that’s part of what some say is a growing problem: AI slop. The song was created by AI, and it is not sung by real people. Breaking Rust’s Instagram page also has several videos of its music, featuring a man who is not real.
Billboard’s “Country Digital Song Sales” chart — which looks at the number of times a song has been bought or downloaded — is a smaller measure of success than its other charts, like the “Hot Country Songs” chart.
Still, according to The Telegraph, it’s the first time a song generated by AI has been at the top of a music chart in the US.
It very likely won’t be the last. Billboard said earlier this month that at least six AI songs or AI-assisted artists had made it to its charts in the previous few months. It added that the number could be higher, because it’s becoming more and more difficult to tell what was created with or helped by AI.
In a study published this month, music streaming app Deezer said that about 50,000 songs created by AI are added to the platform every day. Its study, done with Ipsos, found that 97% of people can’t tell the difference between AI and human musicians.
“I think it’s fair to say you can’t distinguish the best AI music from human-composed music now,” Ed Newton-Rex, a musician who was not part of the study, told The Guardian.
