An image from Breaking Rust’s YouTube page. Credit – Breaking Rust
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What to Know: AI Music
Top of the charts? This week, many headlines declared that an AI-generated song, “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust, had become the biggest country song in America. This is unequivocally not true.
“Walk My Walk,” a laughably generic country song about independence and defiance, had middling organic momentum on streaming and search before it topped Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart last week. The song is currently nowhere to be found on updated daily streaming country charts on Spotify or Apple Music.
But because very few people actually buy digital songs anymore, it only takes a few thousand purchases to top the Country Digital Song Sales chart. This dynamic raises the possibility that someone took this specific tack to generate momentum. This would not be a new phenomenon—Billboards’ digital sales have been a target for manipulation for several years now, forcing the company to make several tweaks to tamp down on gamesmanship.
Feeding frenzy. So “Walk My Walk” is No. 1 in one metric, but not a meaningful one. Regardless, the headlines around its chart-topping have created a flywheel effect, creating more interest and outrage around the song. Some people now like it and some hate it—but people are clicking either way, driving it No. 2 Spotify’s Viral 50 USA chart.
“The permissiveness of Billboard with their charts has been a systemic problem for many years, especially in country music—and that’s what’s facilitating this whole news cycle,” says Kyle Coroneos, the founder of the website Saving Country Music. “Whoever is behind the single, this is exactly what they wanted: to make headlines by going No. 1 on a country chart, and then you get the feeding frenzy, and it bursts through the zeitgeist.”
Slow creep. Still, the “Walk My Walk” discourse shows how AI continues to permeate the music industry in increasing ways. There has been at least one AI artist on a Billboard chart for the past four weeks. And studios like Universal Music Group have been striking deals with AI companies. “The whole industry needs to stand up and say, ‘How are we going to deal with these AI tracks?’” Coroneos says. “This isn’t a year from now, this is happening right now, and it’s affecting real-life human creators who are also trying to get to the top of these charts and are failing.”
Who to Know: Tilly Norwood and Jon M. Chu
This week, my colleague Harry Booth was in Lisbon for Web Summit, where he interviewed the Contextual AI CEO Douwe Kiela onstage. Backstage, he interviewed Eline Van der Velden, the creator of AI actress Tilly Norwood. Norwood is highly controversial, receiving backlash from Morgan Freeman, Emily Blunt, and others.
Van der Velden, an actress and comedian herself, told Harry that she sees AI actors in a category more akin to animation or comic books, rather than a replacement. “I know what it’s like as an actor to not have a lot of work, so I totally sympathize with that. But at the same time this is happening, AI is here, we can’t put it away anymore, and so I like to look at the positives,” she said. “It may in some instances even be more ethical to use AI actors. I’ll let you think of those instances.”
Van der Velden also said that the massive blowback against Tilly had only increased the amount of people interested in working with her. (The Streisand effect strikes again.)
The AI actor Tilly Norwood, generated in the style of the “Will Smith eating spaghetti” meme.Eline Van der Velden
On the other side of this divide is director Jon M. Chu. A couple weeks ago, I interviewed him in preparation for the release of Wicked: For Good, whose prequel brought in more than $750 million at the global box office. Chu sits at the center of Hollywood, and grew up in Silicon Valley revering engineers.
But he’s now much more worried about the impact of the tech industry on storytelling. “The incentive now is not creativity and tools to foster innovation: It’s about colonizing our minds,” he says. “They’re inside our curiosity: They have examined what you’re curious about and picked it apart, and are going to drag you over here and here and here.”
Read More: Jon M. Chu Has a Vision for America
AI in Action
Threat actors used AI agents to carry out a large-scale cyberattack, Anthropic wrote in a report on Thursday. The company wrote that the threat actor—who they believe was a Chinese state-sponsored group—used Claude Code to try to infiltrate into roughly 30 global targets, including on tech companies, financial institutions, and government agencies, and were successful “in a small number of cases.”
“The barriers to performing sophisticated cyberattacks have dropped substantially,” Anthropic wrote. “The very abilities that allow Claude to be used in these attacks also make it crucial for cyber defense.”
What We’re Reading
“All of My Employees Are AI Agents, and So Are My Executives,” Evan Ratliff, Wired
Ratliff, a longtime Wired contributor, decided to launch an app with the help of a phalanx of AI agents—machines that are supposed to be able to perform complex tasks anonymously. Ratliff found that the agents would fabricate entire projects they hadn’t actually done, and often propel each other into hours of insane blather, including making plans to set up “code review sessions at scenic overlooks.” Still, after three months, they did help him build a working prototype of an app.
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