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

submitted 2 months ago by ByteOnBikes to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] smokin_shinobi@lemmy.world 26 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] Vent@lemm.ee 51 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] HappyTimeHarry@lemm.ee 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

most lilely money laundering. Not really a new scam just adding AI to an old one

https://youtu.be/et8R5i5UEjY

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It's not money laundering, they were creating fake engagement and getting advertising revenue out of it.

[–] Badeendje@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah, it's just a good old fashioned grift by the sound of it.

[–] HappyTimeHarry@lemm.ee 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 3 points 2 months ago

Hmm. If that's true, the legal definition and the definition we typically use are very different.