Billboard’s number one song on their “Digital Country Song Sales” chart is called “Walk My Walk” by the band Breaking Rust, and according to Billboard, “Breaking Rust” was created by artificial intelligence (AI).
Welcome to the future, baby…
This is just the beginning.
“In the past few months alone, at least six artists with or with the help of AI have debuted on Billboard’s various charts,” Billboard wrote last week. “That number could be higher, as it becomes increasingly difficult to tell who or what is powered by AI — and to what extent.”
“Many of these chart-topping projects, whose music spans every genre from gospel to rock to country, also come from anonymous or mysterious origins.”
A Week Later – AI Scores a Number One Hit:
Breaking Rust, an AI-powered “band” that emerged online in mid-October based on their Instagram presence, climbed to the top of the chart last week with a song called Walk My Walk. Check out Breaking Rust’s social media pages and you’ll find nothing to suggest there was a real human involved in the music-making part of the band’s songs — just a chiseled-jawed cowboy, clearly generated by AI, and video clips featuring country folk doing folk things or slowly walking away from the camera. To say the different songs are similar would be an understatement: They’re virtually identical, right down to their bland, hollow lyrics.
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“Breaking Rust, the AI-driven country band, debuted at No. 9 on the Emerging Artists chart (dated Nov. 1),” the music publication said. “The project, credited to songwriter Auber Rivaldo Taylor, has generated 1.6 million official streams in the U.S.”
Since I’m not a country music fan, I won’t comment on the quality of the song. To me, it sounds like a lot of country songs. It’s certainly catchy, and you can see people singing along while doing that “Urban Cowboy” dance.
But that’s not really the point, is it?
No, the point is that there are thousands and thousands of country singers out there, a few famous, many unknown, and they’re losing out to AI in the free market, and that must hurt.
The story here is what the story has been since AI first peeked over the horizon to announce its intent to invade popular culture, which is this: There’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. Nothing. Artificial intelligence is coming, and it’s coming for all of us, and while I don’t believe it’s as serious a threat as James Cameron portrayed it to be in The Terminator, I also don’t think it can replace the soul (or whatever that elusive spark is) that makes us human. A computer can’t do anything but copy what it’s taught, and there’s something about the human spirit that can never be taught—inspiration, muse, that sort of thing.
At the same time, so much of our popular culture today is soulless, generic, corporatized, and lacking in inspiration that artificial intelligence is a real threat. Are you trying to tell me that artificial intelligence can’t make one of those bad Star Wars movies from Marvel or Disney? And…
Several country stars like Darius Rucker and Old Dominion frontman Matthew Ramsey have spoken out against artificial intelligence, fearing that the technology could replace songwriters and destroy the music industry’s middle class. Rucker called music powered by AI “scary.” “I don’t want to wake up one day and have a robot standing over me. It’s scary, but that’s what technology can do,” Rucker said.
Country superstars Randy Travis and Martina McBride have condemned unauthorized deepfakes generated by AI, as Congress debates legislation aimed at protecting the image and visual likeness of creators. Last year, hundreds of the world’s biggest musicians, from Billie Eilish to Stevie Wonder, signed a letter urging tech companies not to develop AI tools that would replace human creators.
Something like “Walk My Walk” is clearly within reach. Ah, but could an AI ever come up with “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” or how the great George Jones interpreted and performed it?
I don’t think so.