The songs that the AI CEO provided to Smith originally had file names full of randomized numbers and letters such as “n_7a2b2d74-1621-4385-895d-b1e4af78d860.mp3,” the DOJ noted in its detailed press release.
When uploading them to streaming platforms, including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music, the man would then change the songs’ names to words like “Zygotes,” “Zygotic,” and “Zyme Bedewing,” whatever that is.
The artist naming convention also followed a somewhat similar pattern, with names ranging from the normal-sounding “Calvin Mann” to head-scratchers like “Calorie Event,” “Calms Scorching,” and “Calypso Xored.”
To manufacture streams for these fake songs, Smith allegedly used bots that stream the songs billions of times without any real person listening. As with similar schemes, the bots’ meaningless streams were ultimately converted to royalty paychecks for the people behind them.
Calorie event?! Why not just call it a doughnut.
Still better than the theory that Spotify itself is making AI jazz and putting them on their oficial playlists to not pay artists.
i saw that on drew gooden’s video and it seems undeniable
there needs to be a law that in order to sell something in a store a real person needs to examine it.
And he thought he could get away with it without bribing the politicians!
SMITH created thousands of accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. He then used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream songs that he owned. At a certain point in the charged time period, SMITH estimated that he could use the Bot Accounts to generate approximately 661,440 streams per day, yielding annual royalties of $1,207,128.
From the original press release: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-musician-charged-music-streaming-fraud-aided-artificial-intelligence
Kinda funny how the term “AI” drowns out all rational thought and reading comprehension. Of course, that’s why it’s there in the clickbait headline. I avoid news sources that pull that sort of thing. I don’t appreciate being manipulated.
How is it illegal? And how much did it cost him to make it work I wonder.
The headline focuses on the wrong thing. Making a bunch of crappy songs and uploading the to Spotify and other streaming services is perfectly legal, AI or not.
The illegal part is that he created lots and lots of fake accounts that constantly streamed his songs and masked them to look like authentic listens. So much so that he was making $110k per month. That is straight-up fraud, which is what he was arrested for.
It has nothing to do with AI, but that makes more people click on the article.
most lilely money laundering. Not really a new scam just adding AI to an old one
It’s not money laundering, they were creating fake engagement and getting advertising revenue out of it.
Could be if the revenue was paid out to non existing aliasses and then transferred to himself.
But getting paid royalties directly by Spotify would not need to be laundered as it’s legit money for the irs.
Yeah, it’s just a good old fashioned grift by the sound of it.
getting bots to fake engagement for a profit is money laundering, believe it or not. its a pretty vague crime that basically amounts to getting paid in a way thats deceptive.
Hmm. If that’s true, the legal definition and the definition we typically use are very different.
Free him
to head-scratchers like “Calorie Event,” “Calms Scorching,” and “Calypso Xored.”
As a fan of the Osees, those sound perfectly normal.
Honestly I don’t think this should be a crime.
No.
By inflating his own playcounts, the value of each play goes down. All that money he got? Came straight out of the pockets of real artists.
This is what Spotify was made for so I dont really see the issue. He made the music and the listeners, just look at that engagement you love so much!
Imagine something like a DDOS attack. But it’s fans throwing AI listeners behind artists they love to boost them.
Imagine if fans shaped the music industry instead of the other way around?
Now you’re playing with power
I firmly believe that VR won’t have fully developed until we have power gloves that work like they did in those commercials.
People would very quickly figure out all the adverts being streamed to those accounts weren’t translating into sales, and they’d know something was amiss.
How do you prove that your ad campaign is working?
That’s the neat part- you don’t!
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-2-digital-ep-441/
Indicted on three counts involving money laundering and wire fraud
Oops. Picked on the big dogs by playing their own game.
Seriously though, probably more going on than what we read here.
bro found a glitch in the system
If he had been using the streams to train new AI bands, then that’s just using resources to develop a product.
Maybe he broke terms of service with the streaming companies but they should be pursuing him in civil courts. This feels like abuse of the criminal justice system to retrieve money for companies that were negligent in how they were running their streaming businesses.
This guy produced music and he alsp streamed the music even if it was bots at industrial scale. He seemingly met the criteria needed to get money from the streamers. I’m not a lawyer at all but on cursory look at the definition and elements of wire fraud, I guessing this will hinge on whether this was a “material deception” - but he produced actual music and he streamed it, so is it?
Also i wonder whether it can be proven that the intent was to “defraud” rather than take advantage / game a system.
It feels like the tax payer is bearing the cost of prosecuting someone for a dispute between a person and the multi billion dollar music industry.
Also the music industry trying to paint this as theft of money from other artists is a bullshit - the streaming fees are supposedly divided out proportionately from overall streaming. He caused more streaming so the pot was bigger, and he took a proportionate share of that bigger pot. And any disproportionate sharing reflects the shitty practice’s of the streamers and the big music rights holders who are essentially monopolies squeezing out the smaller competitors from the system.
I don’t buy that. I think it’s fraud. Yeah, the victims of the fraud are not nice people, but the law is supposed to protect all, not just the nice people. This isn’t “gaming the system,” it’s fraud. Uploading the AI-generated songs is fine. The problem was the fake listeners. That’s where the real fraud is.
My city has a modest bus service they contract out to a private company to operate. At the front of the buses, there are scanners that count the number of people that enter the bus. These passenger counts are then baked in to what the company is paid for their services to operate the city’s bus system.
In theory, the contractor company could park a bus somewhere, set up a conga line of people, and just have thousands of phantom passengers board a bus, and then try to bill the city based on these inflated statistics. If they did that, I would absolutely hope they would be charged with fraud.
The law isn’t stupid. There’s a reason laws are enforced by judges, not algorithms. What this person did was little different than hacking a bank account and just stealing money from it. Yes, you could say, “they didn’t do anything wrong, they’re just gaming the system!” You could just as well call guessing someone’s password and stealing their money “gaming the system.” After all, is there anything on the bank’s login page that explicitly tells you not to enter someone else’s account and transfer their money to yours? No judge in a million years would buy that.
This was effectively just a hack. This guy had to create thousands of phantom people to pretend to listen to songs. He was clearly not making any good-faith attempt at making music and was just trying to exploit a weakness in their system design to extract money from them that he didn’t earn. The law thankfully doesn’t work on a standard of “well, they never told me I couldn’t.” Cases like this take into consideration the totality of the circumstances and weigh whether it is fraud or not. And this? This wasn’t some clever technicality a legit artist used to boost their earnings. This was unambiguous fraud.
I really don’t see how this is any different from pretending to be someone else to access their bank info, conning someone out of money by pretending to be a person in need, deep-faking someone’s voice to get their relatives to send money to you, or a hundred other scams involving fake identities. Yes, the victim in this case is a villain themselves, but that doesn’t make it any less a crime.
Yes but you see the companies he defrauded are big and he is small.
Dude, the music industry was accusing the US public of theft of music worth hundreds of trillions of $$$ back in the early 2000s. They started mailing random people with $250,000 fine PER SONG PIRATED. I had a friend with like half the Amazon music library on his home computer.
They do not fucking care and yes, have lobbied every politician and AG to be in their pockets.
Finally a use case for AI.
Spotify might as well be doing this themselves already to avoid having to pay all those annoying artist
Yeah, a streaming service with the hit songs like “Zyme Bedewing” from everyone’s favorite artist “Calorie Event”.
