Man pleads guilty to generating songs with AI then having bots stream them ‘billions of times’ to make over $8 million in royalties

Have you ever stumbled onto an extremely popular artist that you’ve never heard of before, just to wonder if you’re so out of touch that a global phenomenon could pass you by? Well, in at least one recent case, there was a ‘musician’ with billions of streams that basically all came from bots—and if that wasn’t enough, the music itself was AI-generated.

The case is discussed in detail in a press release on justice.gov; the skinny is that North Carolina man Michael Smith “generated thousands of fake songs using artificial intelligence and then streamed those fake songs billions of times,” according to U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, Jay Clayton. “Although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole was real.”

Last Thursday, Clayton announced Smith’s guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The scale of Smith’s operation is hard to fathom: “hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs were streamed by his bot accounts billions of times, which allowed him to fraudulently obtain more than $8 million in royalties,” said the attorney’s office in a press release. Turns out, all those itty-bitty royalty payments add up if you just throw enough bots at the wall.

Smith won’t be sentenced until July, but the crime carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He’s also agreed to forfeit more than $8 million of his ill-gotten gains. It’s no secret that AI is already responsible for the RAMpocalypse and other tangible ills, but its potential for bizarre crimes and careless distortions of ethics—like cloning journalists without their consent—is something that we’ll probably be learning about for years to come.

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