Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots

So why arrested? This is what AI is for right? Oh, he screwed over the wrong people didn't he?

Fuck it. This scam was clever enough that I appreciate and sorta admire it.

Not sure how this is a crime... breach of TOS, sure, but a crime?

What law is being broken here?

If his fake bands are being paid for bot clicks, that's a problem for the platforms to figure out. They need to examine their TOS.

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!

He found a flaw in the system and exploited it. Although he didn’t do anything particularly wrong, the tools he used allowed him to do it. Yet, somehow he has to pay the consequences and the companies that made the tools to exploit the system are not liable. Got it.

Wow. I'm a hobbyist musician. I have ~12 million listens across various streaming services and have made a whopping $45 in the two years since I finally released ~25 years worth of material. (Which is a lot of why it's my hobby and not a living.)

I can't imagine the numbers this guy had to pull off to make that much.

How is this illegal? Sounds legit to me.

I use AI to answer ai generated emails at work all the time. I also use AI to design buildings that will never house people, but computer systems. It's all a shell game folks!!!

oh look they care about it now it's affecting them

Lawsuit, sure, but is it actually illegal?

Can you imagine how exciting it would be though when this actually started to work? This probably started as a side project, with a dude saying like, nahhh this could never work.

Until suddenly it did

The butlerian jihad is missing the point here.

The fraud is using bots (not AI just plain python with selenium or something like that. Sorry) for making fake listeners.

AI here is just some coat to hide the fraud a little better, but nothing more.

i mean this is the system we got set up isnt it?

Maybe a stupid question but.... what exactly was illegal about this? I'm sure there were ToS or EULAs violated, but what law is he being charged on?

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.

Based

If your business model allows somebody to game you like that, you kind of deserve it tbh.

It shouldn't be based on plays. It should be based on money made from a customer and divided between what they listened to/watched. But then you wouldn't make as much money from the people that forget to use their subscriptions, which is probably a huge chunk of their revenue.

bro found a glitch in the system

Its subtle, but the tone of that article's coverage actually sucks... Is futurism a piece of shit?

What a waste of my tax dollars by the DOJ to try to recover spotify´s money for a broken system that they left open and are honestly probably exploiting themselves in parallel to inflate engagement numbers and take streams away from legit artists that they have to play. Remember, they want you in their app, they don't give a shit about actual music. If you'll just listen to random boops, they save cost in the middle. Not where I want the justice systems effort to go.

How is it illegal? And how much did it cost him to make it work I wonder.

A headline that wouldn't have been possible five years ago. Sick.

Finally a use case for AI.

Still better than the theory that Spotify itself is making AI jazz and putting them on their oficial playlists to not pay artists.

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.

I thought about experimenting with this (Guess it is a good thing I didn't). There are so many low effort "Lo Fi" types of streams and tracklists on Spotify and elsewhere. Who is to say my software generated garbage would be any worse than those?

There are also YouTubers who generate low effort music and ask their normal content subscribers to stream their shit on Spotify even if they aren't legitimately listening. So are those streams fraudulent as well?

It sounds like the thing he is getting popped for is the volume of automated streams.

I don't see how this is money laundering or wire fraud. I hope he gets off. Or the real best solution would to make it so the revenue just goes to the artists the AI is ripping off.

Free him

Gonna miss having Zyme Bedewing on my Playlist.

I'm weirdly creeped out about how this article refers to him as "the man". Was this written by an AI?

Unfortunate that he got caught. He was simply playing the same game the corps do but since he isn't mega rich he gets punished.

to head-scratchers like “Calorie Event,” “Calms Scorching,” and “Calypso Xored.”

As a fan of the Osees, those sound perfectly normal.

So it's OK if you are a real artist?

If he had been using the streams to train new AI bands, then that's just using resources to develop a product.

110K/mo was bound to attract attention. So, purely hypothetically, uhh, what would the lowest cutoff be before eyebrows start raising?

"What are you in for?"

I would like that source code for… reasons.

And he thought he could get away with it without bribing the politicians!

Calorie event?! Why not just call it a doughnut.

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.

This is the craziest fucking timeline.

It goes to show streaming services are not long for this world with the introduction of AI.

there needs to be a law that in order to sell something in a store a real person needs to examine it.