Morning Brew Daily
Fake AI Artist Goes Viral on Spotify & More Americans Are Surviving Cancer
15 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the AI singer rising up the Spotify charts.
Then the US workforce is older than ever. It's Thursday, January 15th. Let's ride.
Good morning and happy 25th birthday to Wikipedia, the website your history teacher said you couldn't use as a source. On this day in 2001, the earliest edit on Wikipedia homepage proclaimed, this is the new Wikipedia, and the user-generated information storehouse has now grown to more than 66 million articles across all languages.
If you were to try to read every English Wikipedia page, it would take you about 38 years. But here's my favorite bit of Wikipedia lore, the Scrappy-Doo article. By 2020, the Scrappy-Doo Wikipedia page had become absurdly long at nearly 26,000 words, a higher word count than Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and almost 2,000 words longer than the Wikipedia entry for the history of Poland.
It had six sections, 15 subsections, and 19 sub-subsections. It's since been shortened by editors, but just goes to show you how niche things can get on Wikipedia.
Oh, scrappy do. I never understood where he came from or what his vibe was. So I needed, you know, 26,000 words in order to illuminate that for me. I also never understood why our teachers put the fear of God into us about using a Wikipedia. It is incredibly helpful one to just get a general grasp on a subject. And then two, you can go deeper with the primary sources in the footnotes.
But I do hope our children have a chance to also be lectured about Wikipedia because it's not so clear if it will maintain its relevance. It still receives 15 billion visits monthly, but the nature of those visits are shifting. According to the 1440 newsletter, human traffic fell by 8% last year and roughly 65% of its most intense traffic now comes from bots,
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Chapter 2: What is the controversy surrounding the AI artist Sienna Rose?
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The latest artist climbing Spotify charts, Sienna Rose, has an unreal voice, as in her voice might literally not be real. Rose hit the mainstream this week after Selena Gomez posted a Golden Globes Instagram carousel to her 415 million followers, accompanied by Rose's soulful rendition of Where Your Warmth Begins. Who was this mysterious artist Gomez was platforming?
As people started to dig deeper into Rose's catalog, they found a red flag signaling she might be AI. First of all, her Spotify bio says she's anonymous. The singer also apparently has no public interviews or social media despite 2.6 million monthly listeners and three tracks on Spotify's Viral USA chart.
The rumors intensified after the streaming platform Deezer told Rolling Stones that many of Sienna Rose's albums and songs are detected and flagged as AI. Spotify's official position on AI artists is that they are allowed on the platform and encouraged, but not required to label themselves as such. When it comes to Rose, users have reported being recommended her music
after listening to the similar-sounding real artist Olivia Deen, a move that critics describe as the algorithm siphoning listeners away from real human artists. Toss in Selena's post, then subsequent deletion of Rose's background track, and we have another AI artist controversy on our hands, Neil.
Not to brag, but I saw Sienna Rose at the Mercury Lounge a few years ago. I'm always discovering those up-and-coming artists. I knew she had great potential. No, there is a lot of backlash to the fact that Spotify is promoting and showcasing AI artists. And one of the reasons why... just go to Spotify's core mission. It is, quote, to unlock the potential of human creativity.
And they go on to say that Spotify gives a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it. So Spotify, at its core, talks about elevating human artists and allowing them to make a living through this streaming platform. But at the same time, they are promoting AI artists that are crowding human musicians out.
And I think that's where you're seeing a lot of the backlash from.
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