Is this Billboard Hot 100 hit AI slop?

AICloseAIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All AIEntertainmentCloseEntertainmentPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All EntertainmentReportCloseReportPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ReportIs this Billboard Hot 100 hit AI slop?We can’t be 100 percent sure, but probably.by Terrence O'BrienCloseTerrence O'BrienWeekend EditorPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Terrence O'BrienAug 1, 2026, 6:20 PM UTCLinkShareGiftThat cover art is almost certainly AI, too. | Image: Fenix FlexinAICloseAIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All AIEntertainmentCloseEntertainmentPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All EntertainmentReportCloseReportPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ReportIs this Billboard Hot 100 hit AI slop?We can’t be 100 percent sure, but probably.by Terrence O'BrienCloseTerrence O'BrienWeekend EditorPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Terrence O'BrienAug 1, 2026, 6:20 PM UTCLinkShareGiftPart OfAll the latest in AI ‘music’see all updates Terrence O'BrienCloseTerrence O'BrienPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Terrence O'Brien is the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.Fenix Flexin is best known as a member of Shoreline Mafia, a rap duo from Los Angeles. But he’s recently found solo success with the track “Rubberz,” which has climbed to number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100. Almost immediately, though, questions were raised about the song’s origins, with many speculating that it was largely, if not entirely, generated by AI. Fenix has denied those accusations, but done little to dispel them.Part of the suspicion is certainly due to the fact that the song is a dramatic left turn. Fenix has primarily trafficked in trap-influenced West Coast rap. “Rubberz,” on the other hand, is heavily influenced by ‘80s UK synth pop. The vocal melody is clearly influenced by Morrissey, with Fenix even adopting a fake British accent. But artists are allowed to evolve and experiment. That alone doesn’t prove anything.Perhaps more telling is the simple quality of the recording. Close inspection reveals a number of artifacts and anomalies that are commonly found in AI-generated music. Hi-hats have a certain brittle quality, the chorus vocals sound like a low-bitrate MP3, and reverb tails haphazardly cut off.Speaking with The Verge, songwriter and co-host of the Switched on Pop podcast, Charlie Harding, highlighted the giveaways. “Ghostly backing vocals duck in and out unexpectedly. The drum reverb is full of unnatural digital artifacting reminiscent of a 64kbps MP3 downloaded off of Napster. Because most generative AI companies have trained their model on low-quality MP3s of unlicensed copyrighted material, we hear audibly degraded instrumentation.”Feeding the song into an AI music detector doesn’t deliver a smoking gun. I ran the track through five different tools, and they all said that there was between 20 and 30 percent chance that it was AI or at least AI-assisted. But those sorts of tools are not necessarily super reliable and advance much more slowly than music-making models themselves.Some of the supporting materials, however, have tripped up AI detectors. The single’s cover art and a post celebrating its success were both flagged as being AI-generated with over 97 percent certainty by multiple AI image detectors. Similarly, I fed the lyrics into multipl