AI slop tops Billboard and Spotify charts as synthetic music spreads (www.theguardian.com)

A wave of AI-generated tracks has begun to chart alongside human-produced music: songs by the pseudonymous Breaking Rust — including "Walk My Walk" and "Livin’ on Borrowed Time" — reached Spotify’s U.S. Viral 50 and "Walk My Walk" has led Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart for weeks. Simultaneously, a Dutch AI-backed protest song briefly topped Spotify’s global viral list before rights-holders pulled it from platforms. Artists cited AI as a democratizing creative tool, while earlier examples (like Velvet Sundown) show synthetic music can quickly amass millions of streams and mainstream attention. The phenomenon is driven less by isolated hits than by scale and distribution. Deezer’s study estimates ~50,000 AI-generated songs are uploaded daily (about 34% of submissions) and reports 97% of listeners in a survey couldn’t reliably tell AI from human music. Easy-to-use generative tools plus distribution services (DistroKid, Amuse, Landr, CD Baby) and online communities teaching platform-gaming and monetization tactics create a hyperscalable competitor to human musicians. That raises technical and policy implications for the AI/ML community: improved generation quality, dataset provenance and training practices, detection challenges, copyright and moderation workflows, and potential exploitation of artist datasets — all prompting urgent need for transparent training standards, stronger platform policies and reliable provenance/detection tools.