pupsies Isn't AI. 'misery.' Just Sounds That Way, to Fans and to Our Software

No. pupsies is a person: a 19-year-old from North Carolina who has been making music since 2023 and who gave Billboard an interview about “misery.” in August. The song came out on 18 March 2026, written with its producer, Goetia. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 80 and has reached No. 50. And yet the searches typed with her name keep asking the same thing: is pupsies AI, is “misery.” an AI song, is she an AI artist. We have answered the same question for other acts: Kimo Sounds, whose channel says its music is made with AI, and Imael Angel, who has not said either way. For pupsies, the answer comes from the singer herself.

Where the question comes from

The comments under the official lyric video point to one source. Of the 40 YouTube ranks highest, six are about an AI-made video of the song that has drawn more views than the official one, and together they hold 10,363 likes. The most-liked comment of all, with 5,500, is one of them. The view counts make the same point from the other side: the official lyric video had 2.0 million views on 4 October, while the most-watched upload of the song on YouTube, a fan's lyric video from July, had 22.9 million. Most people have met this song somewhere other than her channel.

Our software heard a machine too

We put the official audio through our listening tools, and they made the same mistake. Our sound classifier, which names what it hears in each passage, called the opening “child singing” and the stretch from 1:05 to 1:20 “synthetic singing”, and filed the last half minute under video-game music. That is the sound of the record: a pitched-up, heavily processed voice over bright, game-like synths, about 118 beats per minute, with a mix flatter than any new song we measured this week. The hook does the rest. Our speech model hears “misery” fourteen times in under two minutes, “nice” ten times and “evening” seven, and the chorus comes back at 0:48, 1:20 and 1:36. It is built to be remembered in seconds, which is also how a machine-made video can borrow it.

A sound more than a stream

On YouTube's daily Shorts chart for 4 October, the list of songs used in short videos, “misery.” was No. 1 in Australia, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom, No. 2 in the United States and in the top 20 in 21 of the 23 countries with such a chart. On Spotify's daily charts the same day it was in the top 200 in four of 64 countries we read, highest at No. 25 in Saudi Arabia, and absent from the global, US and UK lists. It was in none of Apple Music's 64 country top 100s and none of Shazam's 70 country charts. People are hearing it under other people's videos far more than they are pressing play on it.

Our call

pupsies is a person; her song travels as a sound, sometimes on the back of something a machine made. Our bet: on 18 October “misery.” is still in YouTube's Shorts top 10 in the United States, and still outside Spotify's daily top 200 there.