Fact check: Did an AI country song reach No. 1 on Billboard? (mashable.com)

Claim: an AI-generated country song, “Walk My Walk” by a virtual artist called Breaking Rust, topped the Billboard country charts. Reality: the track did reach No. 1 — but only on the narrow Billboard Country Digital Song Sales Chart, a low-volume metric driven by purchases, not streams or radio. On mainstream measures (Spotify’s Country Top 50 and broader Billboard country rankings) Breaking Rust is absent; Morgan Wallen remains the genre’s chart leader. The song’s YouTube play count is modest (~39k), and credits point to an obscure name, Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, fueling confusion about authorship. Why it matters: this episode highlights how generative audio models can convincingly emulate a genre’s tropes and chart in niche metrics, even without widespread listenership. Technically, such models are trained on vast corpora of existing songs, raising real concerns about unconsented use of artists’ work and potential large-scale plagiarism. The incident underscores vulnerabilities in how success is measured (digital sales vs. streams), the potential for chart gaming, and intensifies ongoing legal and ethical debates about AI training data, attribution, and industry protections as AI-generated music proliferates.