Country Legend Don Williams Falls Victim to Fake “AI” Album
When the “Gentle Giant” Don Williams died on September 8th, 2017 at the age of 78, it left an abnormally large crater in the hearts of country music fans, and in the heart of the country music community. A country legend by anyone’s measure, the reason the passing of Don Williams affected us so deeply was due to how it was often the music of Don Williams that you turn to when you need to be consoled, including at times of the death of friends, loved ones, and other country legends.
The reverence with which country fans carry the works and legacy of Don Williams in their hearts is one of the reasons the blatant theft of his identity, and the use of his name to publish fake, AI-generated songs feels like such an egregious offense. That’s exactly what happened on November 1st when an entire album of supposed Don Williams songs was published on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube and other streaming services under the name God and the Horses.
At first, fans of Don Williams felt like a gift had fallen from heaven in the form of a new 12-song album from the Country Music Hall of Famer. Maybe it was an archival release of recently-unearthed recordings. But of course, that is not the case at all. The clearly AI-generated cover, the way all the songs all start off with the same exact sequence of notes, and the fact that the copyright is attributed to someone named “GARY WAYNE MOORE” is a dead giveaway that this is all entirely fake.
The music is still up on all the streaming services as of this post, though hopefully it will be taken down soon. But in many respects, the damage is already done. This is just a harbinger of things to come as the proliferation of AI makes it so easy to compose an album like this in minutes, and have it uploaded to steaming services since the guardrails and gatekeepers are removed, and the entire process of releasing music has becomes automated.
What makes this especially egregious is how these AI imposters were able to release this fake album under the official Don Williams accounts on these streaming services.
The other pernicious issue with all of this is the distrust this activity sows throughout the public when it comes to everything. When Shooter Jennings recently released an album of archived songs from his father Waylon Jennings called Songbird, comments sections filled with people claiming it must be AI, and not actual, real recordings.
Music legends and deceased artists unfortunately are going to become the biggest victims of this activity since they’re not around to help police it. And it’s often older fans who might fall victim to believing these AI-generated songs, albums, and artists are real.
This fake Don Williams album shouldn’t just be pulled down. Streaming services should have to answer as to why music that used someone’s stolen identity was allowed to stay up for going on two days and counting. If “Gary Wayne Moore” is a real person and was truly the individual who created and uploaded it, they should be prosecuted. The FBI or some other organization should definitely investigate this brazen, unprecedented incident.
But there’s also the possibility that all of this is generated automatically through AI practices, and someone can simply enter the names of country legends in a prompt, and spit out completed albums, automatically uploaded to DSPs, and start generating income with little if any human interaction except cashing the checks.
Meanwhile, you have real, actual independent music artists like Cam Pierce, the Piedmont Boys, Slackeye Slim, Grayson Jenkins, Anna Wescoat and more having their albums pulled off of streaming services due to bogus claims of AI-generated streaming fraud.
Don Williams definitely isn’t the first, and he most definitely will not be the last music legend to fall victim to fake AI music. This problem promises to only get worse, not better over time.
With all the promises AI has made and failed to deliver on, it’s fraudulent activity and scams, and useless AI slop that seems to be flooding the marketplace, while undermining public trust in everything since reality can now be so easily faked.
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November 2, 2025 @ 11:01 am
At least you can spot how fake it is in the first 5 seconds – but I’m just curious how someone hijacked Don Williams’ official streaming accounts?
November 2, 2025 @ 3:02 pm
The answer to how this all works , along with many other horrible scams, is laid out in this Venus theory YouTube video:
https://youtu.be/plleJ0Zv0Ww?si=WZgDOjc4gh5Ox18L
Also, all of you should read Liz pelly’s book about why Spotify sucks, which also applies to why they don’t give a shit about this kind of thing.
Also Zachariah Malachi’s music is awesome and we need more of it
November 2, 2025 @ 4:12 pm
The fact that this fake album populated on the official profiles of Don Williams, and across all DSPs is really what makes this a dramatic escalation in this issue, and what also makes this likely a very serious criminal matter.
It’s even worse that two days later, and six hours after this article was posted, the album is still up across DSPs.
November 2, 2025 @ 4:20 pm
If I remember right from the Venus Theory channel video, the way that these scams work is that you can tell a distributor fhat another artist is a collaborator, then remove yourself from the title so that it looks like the thing is in that artist’s name alone, but royalties and whatever else all goes to you. They do zero to verify that the supposed collaborator is actually in on it. Whole bunch of really crazy scams have happened as a result. Ai has made it even easier to do all this stuff.
People have to deal with distributors because Spotify says they have to. There’s like no real mechanical reason why these middlemen really needed to be in there. As all the other artists that trigger mentioned in the article have found out, you just can’t reach a human at your distributor anymore and nobody in this whole bloodsucking business cares. I think I saw that the CEO of Spotify just came worth more money than Spotify has ever paid out to all of the musicians that have ever interacted with Spotify, or something like that. It’s all a shitty grift that is designed to infiltrate every industry and suck the money upwards to a very tiny number of people, And the incentives just aren’t there to do anything about fraud and scams.
A lot of the problem with scams though, still falls on how Spotify and thus the rest of the industry pays . That’s why I got pretty excited when I saw the Deezer (music streaming service) CEOs interview, where he said theyre rolling out a different payment structure. The minute they do that I’m going to be signing up for a premium account.
November 2, 2025 @ 4:29 pm
Stellar,
The problem here is this is also on Apple Music, Amazon, YouTube, all of them. This is not just a Spotify thing. Perhaps they used the collaboration feature, I don’t know. But it seems to me this is an escalation from what we’ve seen in the past. Also, scammers often focus on independent and lesser-known artists because it draws less scrutiny and attention. Don Williams would not qualify as that.
November 2, 2025 @ 4:33 pm
Yeah, I think this all happens at the distributor level. I keep mentioning Spotify because they pioneered the industry practices that allow all this to happen.
I just googled and found an older version of this scam, from before AI. Music was as widespread and easy to do, which basically said that they would use a low quality distributor and rack up views for several weeks before Spotify and the distributor would get around to actually taking it down. Spotify itself makes lots of mistakes in this process.
Sounds like it’s different than the scam involving collaborators, but also this was like several years ago I think.
https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/spotify-is-letting-scammers-rip-artists-off-in-plain-sight
November 2, 2025 @ 4:44 pm
Here’s another example of what seems to have happened here. It’s entirely too easy to hijack an official artist account.
In the absence of regulation, and with the near Monopoly that a tiny number of streaming companies and an even smaller number of distributors have, these companies don’t have to do much to protect your brand from these kinds of scammers. Apparently you can eventually get yourself disambiguated or whatever they call it from the fake person’s uploads, but everyone says it takes weeks.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-16/spotify-ai-music-streaming-fraud-sweet-enoughs-paul-bender/105408242
November 2, 2025 @ 5:23 pm
Stellar,
I appreciate your passion and knowledge on this subject, and I appreciate you including links and citing sources. But the simple truth is that we don’t know what’s going on here, and the fact that you’ve said it could be one of many different possibilities sort of illustrates this. The bleeding edge of AI fuckery is dramatically changing every single minute, and it could be that however the perpetrators uploaded the Don Williams album did it in a way that nobody has reported on before. And saying, “Hey here’s a 40 minute video that explains it all” is not really the distillation of information that really helps anyone.
My first priority is warning the public of what’s happening, and getting the album taken down. As soon as that happens, then hopefully someone can retrace the steps and figure out how this was done so we can close whatever back door they used to do it.
I would appreciate if you would be sparing in your use of links to outside sources that we don’t know if they have the answers to this situation, because I don’t want to be serving traffic to sources I can’t independently verify like abc.net.au .
November 2, 2025 @ 6:11 pm
That’s the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a really major journalism outfit down there. They do a lot of really good deep dives and documentaries on a wide array of issues.
November 2, 2025 @ 5:05 pm
Here’s an article from a year ago talking about this exact situation. They describe a few different ways that this hijacking is done. One of them is the collaborator thing I was talking about, and the other is uploading artist names without including any other metadata, which forces Spotify to attempt to match the incomplete data to an existing profile. I think they mentioned at least one other one involving manipulating metadata.
https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/10/spotify-fake-albums-major-artists-pages/
And they mentioned one that sounds a lot like what happened to Conrad Fischer and Ben And Rose , unless that was just a straight up hijacking where someone created a profile where no profile previously existed and uploaded actual real music front ripped off from YouTube. Man, the stuff is evil and frustrating.
November 2, 2025 @ 12:05 pm
I heard a Chris Stapleton/Luke Combs “duet” on YouTube a couple of days ago. The description even mentioned AI, yet few of the commenters had any idea that what they were hearing was fake, complimenting both artists and begging for the song to be released to radio. All this despite the AI voices having only passing resemblance to either artist’s. Another YouTube faker came up with several Halloween-themed “Gothic country” songs sung by Ella Langley.
It’s all annoying as hell, and YouTube apparently doesn’t care how much of this crap it hosts or that its algorithms recommend it to anyone who searches for country music of any variety.
November 2, 2025 @ 3:08 pm
Youtube at least is beginning to list that stuff as synthetic content, but that’s only happening to some of that content and not all of it.
Incidentally, I just heard interview with the CEO of Deezer, another streaming service, and they have been doing Auto-setection of AI content and said it’s fairly trivial to do. I can more or less detect that stuff with my ears, so I’m not surprised that they’re able to do it with computers. Anyway, those folks are apparently working on a new payment model for artists- completely different issue then this one, but it sounds like they actually care about things that the other streameing services don’t.
Check out the whole video/interview and look at other episodes that fantano has done about AI music, scams and streaming
https://youtu.be/P9XRVKDKwlA?si=n64GrNaxhug5s7Jy
November 2, 2025 @ 3:16 pm
There was a Hank Williams one that dropped a couple months ago and I refused to click on it to see what it was. I assume it’s the same exact situation as there’s. Don Williams won.
November 2, 2025 @ 4:16 pm
Stellar,
The reason this Don Williams situation is different from all the others, and it hasn’t been addressed in the video and links you keep touting is because it populated on the official Don Williams profiles of DSPs. People are making fake Hank Williams/Chris Stapleton songs all day, and uploading them to YouTube. This is old news. The difference here would be if you went to every single Hank Williams accouts across all streaming services, and saw the AI-generated song, and it was making money for someone not named Hank Williams. That is the situation we have here.
November 2, 2025 @ 4:23 pm
No, I think they’re doing that collaborator thing. I’ll a little research but from what I understand its absolutely trivial to upload stuff such that it appears under under an artist’s official profile. Happened to a bunch of living artists already but probably pretty easy for them to do it at least briefly to dead artists with an estate and a record label.
November 2, 2025 @ 12:06 pm
I feel the rage and tone in your keyboard, and I completely concur. This is a travesty. The fact that you’re writing an article about an AI record in itself is a reminder of the pivotal moment in music history that has arrived at our doorstep.
Spotify , Suno , YouTube they are all making billions from AI scrape and regurgitated music. It’s not in their interest to pull it down. So I don’t expect them to do anything to stop it until articles like these are on every FYP in social.
Meanwhile back at the ranch I be
November 2, 2025 @ 1:10 pm
Man I flat out refuse to listen to anything AI-narrated or AI-created thru Suno. There was this guy in the dog park in town I’d often talk to about music and politics and he started posting Suno-created songs of lyrics he wrote. I feel foolish for having taken him seriously. It’s like the guy who shows up with expensive music gear who can’t play at all. Using AI to create “art” makes you a total poser.
November 3, 2025 @ 7:13 am
I believe that this inability to perform AI created music live is the greatest weapon that we as authentic human artists can have.
The big split in music is coming
Authenticity vs artificially I may let artificial intelligence drive my vehicle, but that’s the last thing I wanna use to drive my creativity..
There’s a ton of lawsuits popping up right now and it’s going to reshape the entire industry for the next 50 to 100 years. I believe we need a new format. Why is the music standard to mix down to a file size that was designed for dial up computers? Everyone has high-speed Internet. Let’s start acting like it by creating a new format between MP3 and Wav file sizes . If the billions of fans could hear the dynamic range ofwhat we hear in the studio when we’re mixing. They would be demanding an upgrade.. in the meantime, I’m gonna go fix myself a snack
November 3, 2025 @ 6:33 pm
For some of us there is no substitute for live music. But for millions…they pay to go see an EDM artist push play on a choreographed, light show synced “music” set and say “put your hands up” a few times and make millions.
November 2, 2025 @ 12:42 pm
This kinda backs up the general distrust some of us have as a default.
I don’t know how AI companies aren’t being sued into oblivion and broken up because of their outright theft of intellectual property.
November 2, 2025 @ 4:20 pm
The 9,432 articles published on Saving Country Music are constantly being crawled by AI bots to “teach” AI about country music, answer questions that used to lead people from Google and other search engines here, while now I don’t get those hits, even though it’s my answers.
November 2, 2025 @ 10:03 pm
Maybe the Josie Awards will start giving out awards for the best AI created songs.
November 2, 2025 @ 12:47 pm
I. Hate. A.I.
November 2, 2025 @ 12:59 pm
Here’s a question: I can see how publishing it under the official Don Williams account might be illegal – it’s certainly against the terms of services for these services. But other than that, is anything you describe actually ILLEGAL? Can this person, in fact, actually be prosecuted for this?
I agree it should be illegal – but i’m wondering if something would actually need to be passed to institute these types of protections.
November 2, 2025 @ 1:12 pm
If someone owns the rights to an artist it’s probably legal to make AI-music using their voice. Without researching the legal side that’s my guess.
November 2, 2025 @ 3:55 pm
Thats not what is happening here actually. See Conrad’s comment:
November 2, 2025 @ 4:23 pm
If someone wants to ask Chat GPT or some other AI prompt to make a song in the style of Don Williams, there is nothing illegal about that. They can probably also upload it on YouTube or someone else, explain it’s an AI rendering of a Don Williams song, and still probably be okay. But impersonating someone, trying to act like it’s Don Williams singing, and collecting money from it, that’s fraud. The recordings are fraudulently trying to earn money by manipulating the public into believing they’re recordings from Don Williams.
November 3, 2025 @ 4:24 am
I remember Tom Waits suing Frito-Lay for voice misappropriation. They used a sound-alike singer in a commercial after Waits declined their offer. This is a different situation here but it is certainly voice misappropriation.
November 2, 2025 @ 1:14 pm
AI will destroy the arts as we know them. It is well on the way, and I say this wishing it wasn’t so.
I’m a photographer and so disgusted with it. Flickr is a popular photographer’s resource so many of us use to host our photographs and categorize and catalog them. I’m seeing entire user accounts now that are 100% FAKE PHOTOS ALL GENERATED WITH AI. I think even the accounts are generated by AI. Its an abomination. Ive seen technology devalue things and end careers, but never so many industries and careers at once. Its astounding and shocking.
I will not support AI music knowingly, but somehow I think it wont matter. The kids coming up think everything should be free, and they will 100% support AI everything.
I have discussions with “tech people” about this subject semi frequently and when asked why we are doing all this, the answer is ” because we can.” Theres no stopping it, it’s a runaway train. I truly despise all of it with every fiber of my being.
I have no answers.
November 3, 2025 @ 3:59 am
On the other hand; AI would probably make better books, movies and music than what we’re currently been offered by the major companies.
What is real about music and movies these days, anyway? Auto-tune, CGI, filters, stock samples etc.
That’s how bad it is.
And it would be cool to watch Robert Mitchum kick Charlie Hunnam’s ass.
November 2, 2025 @ 1:18 pm
Yes, the future is bleak. Not just for music, but all around. It’s about to be 1984. It’s not far off that we’ll all have to check in with the Authority to find out what’s true or real…that day.
November 2, 2025 @ 2:30 pm
Trigger, this is serious. On YouTube music, the songs say “Provided to Youtube by OneRPM.” I have run into OneRPM before. They ripped a bunch of Ben and Rose songs from Youtube and uploaded them to streaming services without our permission. They also went in a claimed the copyrights on about 6 of their songs on YouTube, one of which I had written, which resulted in serious loss of income for a little while for them. There’s another Amish band called the Brandenbergers that OneRPM ripped songs from YouTube and started profiles on streaming platforms.
It took a lot of work to get it straightened out, and I still might not have it all squared away for Ben and Rose. OneRPM goes unpunished.
November 2, 2025 @ 3:12 pm
Holy shit That’s horrible.
Check out the two links I provided in some other comments here. The Venus theory YouTube video about ai and streaming scams. Talks about that kind of exact thing. The gal who runs the YouTube channel Top Music Attorney (Delgado Law or some such law firm in reality ) is probably a good person to contact about this.
Drop me a line too:
Honkytonkheartache@gmail.com
November 2, 2025 @ 3:03 pm
“This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”
-Admiral Josh Painter, “The Hunt for Red October”
November 2, 2025 @ 3:20 pm
I was a victim of this hoax. I saw this album as an upcoming release in iTunes and pre-purchased it. There were no samples available. It was downloaded on Friday and yesterday I decided to give it a listen. My first impression was – That’s not Don Williams. Then I thought, maybe this is an archival recording from back when he was with the Pozo-Seco singers, but it sounded too “modern”. I went and listened to some of his much older recordings anyway and could tell it wasn’t him. Then I did an internet search and found the album on other streaming services, but didn’t find anything about the origins of the album. Thanks Trigger for publishing this. I know now I inadvertently fell, and paid, for bogus music.
November 2, 2025 @ 5:48 pm
Five seconds of listening and it was obvious these are fake recordings: AI-generated content with lazy lyrics and awful instrumentation (if we could call it that). Honestly, a very lazy fraud to say the least.
I have serious questions about how someone was able to upload an album to a deceased artist’s Spotify page. Was an account hacked, password leaked, or does Spotify have zero controls over album upload? Here, the intent is obvious: use Don Williams’ name to make money, although with modern streaming, I wonder how much that could possibly be. Obviously, the fraud would need to involve significant numbers of artists and albums to be remotely profitable, which makes me wonder just how prevalent this is.
On a more sinister note, who owns the rights to deceased artists’ name, image and likeness? Is there a world in which dishonest people can acquire the “rights” to a certain artist, against that artist’s consent, well after they are retired or dead, to then release obviously fake music under that artist’s name? We’re living in the Wild West of this stuff right now and it’s honestly pretty scary.
November 2, 2025 @ 11:06 pm
This is sad A.I. should be abolished it’s gonna get harder and harder to know what’s real and what’s not.
November 3, 2025 @ 12:39 am
Is it as boring as a actual Don Williams album?
November 3, 2025 @ 4:04 am
I suppose you need to age a bit to appreciate old Don.
You should give him a listen in, say, ten years from now, maybe the 23 year old you lived enough by then to understand the songs.
November 3, 2025 @ 9:58 am
Nothing to do with that find him completely boring besides Lord Have Mercy On a Country Boy and Tulsa Time.
And its laughable how much better Josh Turner version of Lord Have Mercy On a Country Boy and Alan jackson It Must Be Love is vs his version
November 4, 2025 @ 6:37 am
I love Don Williams. I understand why younger folks might think him boring, but his music is like a big warm blanket for me. What I love about him is that he was so laid back. No flash, no big light shows, just good songs played well. It made him a superstar back in the day. Garth Fundis is a great producer, too. They were an amazing team.
November 5, 2025 @ 8:35 am
You are correct about those covers being superior to the source material.
November 3, 2025 @ 2:46 pm
Everything is boring when you don’t understand it.
November 3, 2025 @ 6:10 pm
Yes. Also if you’re a dildo.
November 3, 2025 @ 12:53 am
Trig,
Do you follow the Udio Suno lawsuits? Udio just settled with UMG. The terms of settlement are actually good. No more Ai onto Spotify or other platforms. Users can’t download their generated stuff
November 3, 2025 @ 3:15 am
a lot of music my girls listen to is obviously AI generated. Man, this is scary, there are no rules!
November 3, 2025 @ 4:05 am
Taylor Swift is pure AI, from the visuals to the voice.
I doubt she ever really existed.
November 3, 2025 @ 3:24 am
…and anyway the album is still on on spotify by the time i’m writing this.
November 3, 2025 @ 3:52 am
I listened to these computer tracks, and they’re better than the country music recorded by breathing humans today.
November 3, 2025 @ 4:48 am
As with everything now, people are just going to have to be a bit extra vigilant… and at least know this stuff is out there. Based off the amount of ai slop and manufactured- fake outrage content people fall for already on social media, we arent off to a great start.
November 3, 2025 @ 4:50 am
Curious how bad the songs are. Not curious enough to find out, though.
November 3, 2025 @ 7:25 am
When Rap and Hip Hop began to become mainstream forms of music I remember complaining about how anyone without any musical talent could throw together a mix of computer generated beats and sounds, rap over it, and call it music. Now I guess you just have to say Hey Alexa, generate me a song.
Sometimes I miss the good ole days when music wasn’t sterile, and you could hear things like reverb and tube amp hum. Hope whoever is in charge of Don Williams estate can get his atrocity removed from streaming sites soon.
November 3, 2025 @ 9:49 am
Someone sent me a “Gospel” song that was obvious AI done in the style of a George Strait/Luke Combs duet. I refused to listen.
November 3, 2025 @ 2:15 pm
Around 9am PT the album was still on Spotify. I checked again today (Nov 3) at around 12pm PT and the album was gone from Spotify.
November 3, 2025 @ 2:24 pm
I’ve been checking intermittently all day and it was still up last time I checked about 90 minutes ago. So my guess is it’s been removed in the last hour. Glad it’s removed, but kind of crazy how long it took.
November 3, 2025 @ 6:14 pm
AI is perfect for lazy, talentless, imagination deficient, hollow individuals. This goes for both listeners and creators. Soon a guy or girl playing live with only an acoustic guitar will be in high demand from those blessed with more than two functioning braincells.
November 3, 2025 @ 6:27 pm
It’s all pretty weird, but this is only the beginning. Wait till the technology evolves to the point that you won’t be able to tell if it’s real or not, or maybe it can crank out infinite songs that are better than the artist’s’ best song. Will put a new light on the idea of separating the art from the artist.
November 4, 2025 @ 7:42 am
“AI makes it so easy to compose an album like this in minutes, and have it uploaded to steaming services”
Steaming, indeed. As in a steaming pile of $^!+ in this instance.
The services need to get this under control.
November 4, 2025 @ 11:18 am
Unless these companies start getting sued for fraud by the legitimate copyright owners, and a lot, they will have very little incentive to stop. Legislation could help a good bit too, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon, or any interest among policy makers for change. They all seem ready to just let it rip until a real tragedy happens. The US government will likely legislate AI retroactively to harm, not as a preventative measure; even though many of us can see the coming shitstorm a mile away and getting closer every day.
I could see in the not-to-distant future a label for “human made music” or “AI generated music” similar to the Parental Advisory label that was created to hinder sales but had the opposite impact. I remember as a kid wanting the album with the PA sticker. Anyone remember 2 Live Crew?
AI music isn’t going away and will only get better. I am not sure what the eventual outcome will be; will AI replace most musicians? I hope not. I do know a good portion of the younger generation that grew up not having to purchase music from a physical store may see it differently. Many of them assume music should be free or cheap. They do not understand the labor and investment that goes into creating real music.
There is an AI artist initials XM (won’t spell the name here) that recently got a label deal worth 3 million dollars and debuted a song on the Billboard Charts. That does not give me hope. I am not sure what the antidote to all this is, but somehow those of us who give a F about real music have to start demanding it, or at least for the fake crap to be labeled as such. While writng this comment I started to think about the lyrics of a song by The Judds… Grandpa, tell me ‘bout the good old days…
November 6, 2025 @ 6:12 pm
I’m as happy as anyone to blast this technology, but it’s not going away. Obviously posting a Don Williams album should not be allowed, but stealing peoples sound, music, etc has been around forever. Thanks to Trigger for keeping everyone in the loop. Hell, he even listened to my album.
November 8, 2025 @ 11:25 am
Even if a song isn’t AI-generated, it’s apparently fairly easy to get it attributed to an artist who had nothing to do with it, and who died long before it was created.
Over the past several years, the adult children of a favorite 70s pop artist of mine have had to request that Spotify remove several “duet” singles that some unknown artist or alias has fraudulently attributed to their mother, presumably to gain unearned streams.
And yet, as Trigger says, Spotify is taking down music of actual, legitimate artists with no easy path to reinstatement. The platform really needs to get its act together on the policing front.
November 9, 2025 @ 3:36 pm
The computer nerd cocksuckers who invented AI should be tried at The Hague for unleashing this disaster on us humans