A North Carolina man, Michael Smith, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for collecting millions in royalties from bot-farming streams of AI-generated songs. The US Justice Department announced the sentencing of the 54-year-old musician in a press release on 6 October. He pleaded guilty in March of this year to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Smith has also been forced to forfeit the $8 million in royalties he earned from the bot-generated streams. He collected those royalties from 2017 until his arrest in 2024. According to the Justice Department, he created as many as 10,000 fraudulent accounts to stream songs he owned, most of them largely made using AI.
To avoid drawing attention, Smith spread his automated streams across thousands of songs rather than concentrating them on one track. His hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs were streamed by his bot accounts billions of times. The Justice Department noted that in April 2023, the entire Taylor Swift catalogue received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams, while Smith's bot accounts used family plans to stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times in the same month.
"Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud," said US Attorney Jamie Mc Donald. "By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans."
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing