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What you need to know: AI music
Top of the charts? This week many headers announced that Breaking Rust's AI-generated “Walk My Walk” has become the most popular country song in America. This is definitely not the case.
“Walk My Walk,” a laughable country song about independence and defiance, had average organic momentum on streaming And search before it topped the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart last week. The song is currently not listed in the daily updated country streaming charts on Spotify or Apple Music.
But since so few people buy digital songs these days, it only takes a few thousand purchases to top the Country Digital Song Sales chart. This dynamic makes it more likely that someone took this particular course to create momentum. This is not a new phenomenon: Billboards digital sales have been subject to manipulation for several years, forcing the company several settings to reduce gaming skill.
Feeding the madness. So “Walk My Walk” is number 1 in one regard, but not in importance. However, the headlines surrounding its chart-topper created a flywheel effect, generating even more interest and outrage around the song. Some people love it now and some people hate it, but people are choosing it either way, pushing it to number two on the Spotify Viral 50 USA chart.
“Billboard's permissiveness with their charts has been a systemic problem for many years, especially in country music, and that's what's driving this whole news cycle,” says Kyle Coroneos, founder website Saving country music. “Whoever is behind the single, this is exactly what they wanted: to make headlines, go to number one on the country charts, and then you get a feeding frenzy and it breaks through the zeitgeist.”
Slow creep. However, the “Walk My Walk” discourse shows how AI continues to make inroads into the music industry. Was at least one AI artist on the Billboard chart for the past four weeks. And studios like Universal Music Group are making deals with artificial intelligence companies. “The whole industry needs to stand up and say, 'How are we going to handle these AI trends?' says Coroneos. “This isn't happening in a year, it's happening right now, and it's affecting real human creators who are also trying to get to the top of these charts and failing.”
Who to Know: Tilly Norwood and Jon M. Chu
This week my colleague Harry Booth was in Lisbon for the Web Summit, where he interviewed Contextual AI CEO Duve Kiela on stage. Backstage, he interviewed Elin Van der Velden, the creator of actress Tilly Norwood's artificial intelligence. Norwood causes great controversy by receiving backlash from Morgan Freeman, Emily Blunt and others.
Van der Velden, herself an actress and comedian, told Harry that she views AI actors in a category more akin to animation or comics rather than replacements. “I know what it's like for an actor to not have a lot of work, so I totally sympathize with that. But at the same time, when it happens, artificial intelligence is here, we can't put it off any longer, and so I like to look at the positive,” she said. “In some cases, it may even be more ethical to use AI actors. I'll let you think about those cases.”
Van der Velden also said that Tilly's widespread criticism has only increased the number of people interested in working with her. (The Streisand effect appears again.)
On the other side of this divide is director Jon M. Chu. I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago in preparation for his release. Evil: For goodwhose prequel grossed more than $750 million worldwide. Chu lives in downtown Hollywood and grew up in Silicon Valley respecting engineers.
But now he's much more concerned about the tech industry's influence on storytelling. “The incentive now is not creativity and tools to promote innovation: it is about the colonization of our minds,” he says. “They are inside our curiosity: they have studied what you are interested in, taken it apart and are going to drag you here, here and here.”
Read more: Jon M. Chu has a vision for America
AI in action
Attackers used artificial intelligence agents to carry out a large-scale cyberattack, Anthropic writes in an article report on Thursday. The company wrote that the attacker, who they believed was a Chinese state-sponsored group, used Claude Code to try to infiltrate approximately 30 global targets, including technology companies, financial institutions and government agencies, and was successful “in a small number of cases.”
“The barriers to sophisticated cyberattacks have dropped significantly,” Anthropic writes. “The very capabilities that allow Claude to be used in these attacks also make him critical to cyber defense.”
What we read
“All my employees are AI agents, just like my managers.” Evan Ratliff Wired
Ratliff, longtime Wired participant, decided to run the application with the help of a group of AI agents – machines that should be able to anonymously perform complex tasks. Ratliff discovered that agents fabricated entire projects that they didn't actually carry out, and often kept each other talking wildly for hours, including making plans to organize “code review sessions at scenic viewpoints.” However, after three months they helped him create a working prototype of the application.
