In November of 2025 when an AI artist named Breaking Rust was breaking the internet by topping the Billboard Country Digital Songs Sales chart and setting off alarm bells everywhere, the outlook appeared bleak at being able to hold back what seemed to be an impending onslaught of AI content that would catastrophically overwhelm the entire music industry in 2026, and quickly kill off the careers of countless human creators.
Now here a couple of weeks into 2026, the concern for AI is certainly still elevated and critical. It’s still imperative that everyone in the industry insist on the disclosure of AI-generated content, and set up policies of how to handle it in ways that can protect human creators. But for a few important reasons, the five-alarm AI fire that seemed to be raging out of control going into 2026 has begun to feel more like a blaze that might be able to be managed, at least in the near term.
But it’s not really because anyone in the music industry has exuded any sort of leadership on the matter. Major labels are partnering with AI companies left and right, giving up the copyrights of their artists to train AI models with little authorization from the artists themselves. Labels want their piece of the AI pie. Billboard and others still refuse to take firm stances on disclosing or excluding AI from charts. Even the Grammy’s President is softening his position on the technology.
“It probably sounds a little crazy, like, ‘This guy doesn’t have his position together,’ but it’s really tough because I want to advocate for our human members and human creators, but I also realize that this technology is here,” Grammy President Harvey Mason Jr. said recently.
The reason that the momentum behind the AI tsunami feels like it’s starting to subside is because far beyond just escaping the lab, AI tools capable of making full songs and albums in a matter of seconds in free trial modes have fallen into the hands of the worst of actors and dregs of society to so absolutely over-exploit and undercut the technology, it’s collapsing under its own weight.
Yes, AI is hitting the saturation point in society that we all feared, especially on places like social media. But it’s all so sloppy and ridiculous and insulting to the intelligence that it’s eating itself from the inside, and giving the music industry and human creators at least a short-term reprieve where hopefully cooler heads and smarter minds can figure out how to move forward with this technology more equitably.
As massive corporations and tech oligarchs try to sell society on the essential nature of new resource-sucking data centers in their local communities, or public investment in the AI arms race, every single day the public is growing more skeptical of the technology, more dubious of its outcomes, and less likely to interface with platforms that favor AI slop—let alone supply them with their audio entertainment—because it all feels so smarmy.
Just over the last week of casually perusing the internet, Saving Country Music came across new AI-generated fake songs from Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton. Then going down a rabbit hole, a whole gaggle of fake Miranda Lambert songs from the same account were discovered. About a dozen fake AI Chris Stapleton songs were found, all that were around 8 minutes long. No, they haven’t gone viral. But they also haven’t spurred national outrage with fans demanding they get taken down.
Note: Videos screenshot as to not encourage plays.
Where’s the outrage? It’s nowhere to be found because coming upon completely and obviously fake AI material is just now part of daily modern life. Years ago, there would be news stories about this, involved think-pieces about the existential crisis it poses to the industry, personal identity, and intellectual property. Now, users who stumble upon fake, AI-generated content don’t even feel the need to report it. Why would you? It’s just one of a million. As dystopian as it all might feel, it’s also been rendered anodyne by its prolific nature.
A recent study by YouGov determined that Only 5% of Americans say they “trust AI a lot.” 68% of respondents wouldn’t let AI act without specific approval. And 77% are concerned that AI could pose a threat to humanity itself. Yes, over 3/4 of the population thinks that AI could be an existential threat to the species. And all of these numbers are up from previous benchmarks, meaning public buy-in is dramatically waning, even if people are still using Chat GPT to help with menial, everyday tasks.
Meanwhile, any time a company uses AI to generate a commercial, it generates a massive backlash. Hollywood thought (or worried) human actors would become obsolete. But the public is roundly rejecting AI for narrative form entertainment. Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2025 was “slop,”meaning, “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” In the war for hearts and minds, AI is losing.
In the financial realm, everyone’s talking about a potential AI tech bubble, and whether it’s ready to burst. But folks should remember that even in 2000 when the dotcom bubble burst, it didn’t mean the internet didn’t happen. It just grew at a more reasonable pace—-and in a more intuitive, natural, and a times, regulated pace too.
AI has become so messy, some are predicting the end of social media since it’s been so crudded up, it insults the intelligence to even interface with it. Others are talking about the end of the internet altogether, with Gen Z unplugging more and more, preferring analog and in-person experiences, with AI exposing the phony nature of the entire thing. Physical media in music is surging, with vinyl becoming more popular than any other time since the ’80s, and CDs and even tapes increasing their sales in 2025.
None of these assessments should mean we should cease the alarm bells about what AI could wrought not just the music industry and human creators, but throughout society. The AI wave is still most certainly coming, while it’s already disrupting music in significant ways. And for young adults just graduating high school and college, AI has already resulted in a recessionary economy and 10% unemployment for them.
But it appears that the big, necessary check on AI’s power is not coming from governmental regulation or institutional guardrails—or from safety protocols instituted by the developers themselves. It’s coming from AI itself enacting such a wholesale enshitification of everything it touches, it’s like running an integrity-eroding exposé on itself every single day that reaches the masses.
If the proprietors of AI had any smarts beyond the programmatic intelligence of building the thing, they would have kept it in the hands of the few. The earliest pioneers of AI technology scoffed at the mere idea of connecting AI to the internet as catastrophic. Now the internet is primarily where AI lives in consumer-grade interfaces to make fake songs from real artists to dupe morons. AI was supposed to cure Cancer and get us to Mars. Instead it’s just enraging your elderly parents/grandparents with fake news, and doing bad Miranda Lambert impressions.
The thing about technology is it tends to only get better and better. But the thing about modern society is it’s tending to only get worse and worse. Society might not be immune to AI’s disruptive effects, but AI isn’t immune from the ills of late-stage Capitalism or the mediocrity crisis. In fact, AI is helping to feed the devolutionary trend.
There will always be a certain level of gullible people who will be able to keep hucksters, fraudsters, and outright criminals afloat. But for the rest of society, they’ve already grown so accustomed to separating the wheat from the chaff, spotting AI from the start, and embracing the real from the fake, whether it’s food, or information, or music. Yes, the fear of what AI could have in store for 2026 is still real and valid. But there should still be a base level of trust in humanity to sniff out bullshit, and side step it.
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