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An AI artist hit the Billboard charts. Nobody knew. Does anyone care?

10 million people fell in love with a singer who doesn't exist.

Did you know that when Juicy Fruit gum launched in 1893, artificial flavor wasn’t a red flag? It was the whole appeal. Technology was new, manufactured things felt like the future, and “artificial” meant progress.

Looks like not much has changed. The No. 44 artist on Billboard’s Emerging Artists chart is a singer who doesn’t exist. Millions of views, comment sections full of people saying, “What a voice.” All artificial flavor. As Mark Wales reports for GOOD, scientists say we’re literally wired to respond to melody and rhythm, and we’re not wired to care so much about who or what created them. But the artists whose voices and styles trained these AI models have a few things to say about that.

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And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we shared mind-altering research showing that just thinking about this sort of drink or that can change your headspace. 

When GOOD readers belly up to the bar this weekend, what will they be ordering? It’s almost a tie between a nice glass of wine and nothing at all.

• A cocktail, please. Something strong and complex. (22.0%)

  A glass of wine, thanks. Sophisticated, a little selective. (34.0%)

  Get me a beer. Unbothered, consistent, iconic. (12.0%)

  Nothing for me tonight. My personality is already plenty. (32.0%)

Health

If you think you’re too old to learn a new language, vous vous trompez

Science has some good news for anyone who thinks they've already missed their window.

Thanks to a 486-day streak in a certain cartoonish language app, I can tell you about my school supplies, the color of my favorite shoes, and a very little bit about siblings in four languages. Count 'em! Uno, zwei, three, quatre! So it was a genuine delight to stumble onto Karen Stollznow's research, which says that, however slow my progress might be, there's real hope for me yet.

According to Stollznow, a linguist and author of the forthcoming Beyond Words, age isn't actually the wall most of us assume it is. Kids do have one real edge, but it's narrower than you'd think, and the thing that's actually holding most adult learners back? It's not their aging brains. It's something far more fixable.

Culture

Researchers showed people photos of coffee shops from Chicago to San Francisco, nobody could tell them apart.

If it looks like a chain and serves coffee like a chain… it’s a chain.

You'd be forgiven for thinking Indie Café was a franchise. Sometimes it seems like there's more variation between Starbucks locations than among the mom-and-pop spots scattered across North America. Despite being ’ independent’, they all have the same exposed brick, same chalkboard, same barista who definitely has a band.

Researchers Conrad Kickert, Jeffrey Parker, and Kelly Gregg started noticing the pattern, and being the kind of academics who apparently do their best thinking over a cortado, they decided to actually measure it. They surveyed over 100 young urban professionals about their favorite local coffee shops, then asked a fresh group to identify which cities those shops were in. Cities with famously distinct design cultures. Places that pride themselves on local character and local character alone. Almost nobody got it right. 

Our trio of over-caffeinated researchers has some uncomfortable theories about why, including one that puts the blame squarely on the customers.

On April 10, 1849, a cash-strapped New York mechanic named Walter Hunt sat down with a piece of wire and a nagging $15 debt. Within hours, he had twisted that wire into one of the most elegantly simple inventions in human history: the safety pin. He filed for U.S. Patent No. 6,281 that same day, describing a fastener with a coiled spring mechanism and a protective clasp that shielded the sharp point from snagging skin or fabric.

Then he sold the rights for $400. Just $400. The businessmen who bought that patent made fortunes. Today, billions of safety pins are manufactured every year, holding together everything from diapers to haute couture runway looks.

What Hunt lacked in business instincts, he more than made up for in ingenuity. He went on to invent the forerunner of the sewing machine, a repeating rifle, and a street-sweeping machine, collecting patents and selling them off cheaply with remarkable consistency.

The next time a safety pin saves your outfit five minutes before a big meeting, you have a $15 debt and one very inventive mechanic to thank for it.

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