A country singer with no clear human footprint just climbed to the top of the U.S. download charts. The murky origins of the hit track are stirring debate about how far AI has already seeped into mainstream music.
An artist suspected of being virtual, with a voice generated by Artificial Intelligence, has reached the top of one of the most popular country-music download charts in the United States, marking a first.
Walk My Walk, by Breaking Rust, an act with no known identity, is now the most downloaded country track, according to the data published on Monday by Billboard for its downloads-only category.
Neither Breaking Rust nor anyone behind the project acknowledges using AI on social platforms or streaming services. Still, the voice isn’t linked to any identifiable singer, and the artwork, photos, and music videos are clearly AI-made, leading the industry to label Breaking Rust an AI act.
Several AI-music detection tools used by AFP flagged Walk My Walk as likely AI generated, with probabilities between 60 and 90 percent. The song credits list Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor as its writer, a name that appears online only through its tie to Def Beats AI (defbeatsai), a project openly described as AI-driven.
Reached for comment on Tuesday, the creators behind Breaking Rust’s Instagram page did not immediately respond.
If Breaking Rust is confirmed as AI-made, it would mark another turning point in the technology’s rapid rise in the music world. Since the arrival of AI-music platforms like Suno and Udio, fully AI-generated tracks have exploded across streaming services.
In July, the creators of Velvet Sundown confirmed that their vintage-rock project was AI-generated, after one of its tracks surpassed a million streams. In September, the AI singer Xania Monet became the first virtual artist to enter U.S. sales charts.
A small label, Hallwood Media, signed Xania Monet in a deal estimated at three million dollars by several U.S. outlets. A Mississippi woman in her early thirties, Telisha Jones, later revealed she had used Suno to produce Xania Monet’s songs.
So far, Deezer remains the only major audio platform to consistently label tracks that are fully created by AI.
With AFP
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