Man charged with wire fraud for streaming AI music and earnings millionswww.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/musician-charged-with-10m-streaming-royalties-fraud-using-ai-and-bots/
271 sats \ 10 comments \ @lv99slacker 15 Sep tech
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31 sats \ 0 replies \ @petertodd 15 Sep
Bitcoin fixes this.
The listeners can simply pay real sats to the artists directly with lightning.
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @jackmo2341 15 Sep
I’m genuinely confused about how this is fraud. If he generated the songs and the he’s paying bots to listen to them, who is he stealing money from? Maybe Spotify has a no bot policy, but is breaking TOS the same as fraud?
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @ChrisS 16 Sep
Depends who you steal from and who they know and how much you steal.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @160ed04091 15 Sep
is just impressive that With advancements in AI, it’s now possible to create music using algorithms and machine learning models.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Malachi17 15 Sep
Manipulating the streaming data is the clear no-no here. The rest seems like normal radio operating procedure except you are using AI instead of artists, but then, as I said...
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cooder 16 Sep
Thousands of other "musicians"...
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @jgbtc 16 Sep
The author of that article must have gotten paid a bonus for every time they used the words "fraud" or "fraudulently".
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitalion 16 Sep
Artificial intelligence is a useful tool, but in this area there is still much to be defined. In the case of generating source code, there are already many projects that will not allow contributions that have been generated with AI, but in the case of music, we would have to see.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @lv99slacker OP 15 Sep
"North Carolina musician Michael Smith was indicted for collecting over $10 million in royalty payments from Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube Music using AI-generated songs streamed by thousands of bots in a massive streaming fraud scheme.
According to court documents, Smith fraudulently inflated music streams on digital platforms between 2017 and 2024 with the assistance of an unnamed music promoter and the Chief Executive Officer of an AI music company.
At the peak of his operation, Smith allegedly employed over 1,000 bot accounts to artificially boost streams across various platforms. On October 20, 2017, Smith emailed himself a financial breakdown outlining how he operated 52 cloud services accounts, each with 20 bot accounts, totaling 1,040 bots.
He also estimated that each account could stream approximately 636 songs per day, resulting in around 661,440 streams daily. With an average royalty rate of half a cent per stream, Smith calculated that the daily earnings would reach $3,307.20, monthly earnings of $99,216, and annual earnings exceeding $1.2 million.
By manipulating streaming data, Smith fraudulently collected more than $10 million in royalty payments after his bots streamed hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times. In a February 2024 email, he boasted that his songs generated "over 4 billion streams and $12 million in royalties since 2019.""
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @lv99slacker OP 15 Sep
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