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.
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.
Calorie event?! Why not just call it a doughnut.
“What are you in for?”
So why arrested? This is what AI is for right? Oh, he screwed over the wrong people didn’t he?
He was arrested because he faked a ton of information related to his accounts to make it look like many people were doing it. I love that he gamed the system, but also it sounds like he totally committed financial fraud while doing so.
There are other people who have gamed the system without also committing fraud
This is going to be something like fraud, larceny, etc.
Stealing is only wrong if you steal from rich people. It’s perfectly acceptable if the victims are poor. /s
In addition to the others that replied to you:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist
The owners made an example of the journalist that broke the Panama Papers story.
She was a journalist who used the Panama Papers to expose high level corruption in Malta. Galizia did not break the Panama Papers story, she’s impressive enough without people making stuff up about her.
wanting to see if the killer was ever caught. Daphne Caruana Galizia Killer Caught After a thorough investigation, several individuals have been implicated and charged in connection with the assassination of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia on October 16, 2017. Key developments include:
Vincent Muscat’s Confession: In March 2021, Vincent Muscat, one of the three men accused of the murder, confessed to the crime in court. He described how he and two others, brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio, used binoculars and a telescope to follow Caruana Galizia’s movements, eventually planting and triggering the car bomb that killed her. Life Sentence Sought: In August 2021, prosecutors sought a life sentence for Yorgen Fenech, a businessman accused of masterminding the murder. Fenech has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. Malta State Responsibility: An independent inquiry, concluded in July 2021, found the Maltese state responsible for Caruana Galizia’s murder due to its creation of a “culture of impunity” that allowed her killers to believe they would face minimal consequences. Arrests and Charges: Several individuals have been arrested and charged in connection with the murder, including: Vincent Muscat (pleaded guilty and received a 15-year sentence in February 2021) George Degiorgio (charged and awaiting trial) Alfred Degiorgio (charged and awaiting trial) Yorgen Fenech (charged and awaiting trial) Melvin Theuma (turned state witness and received a pardon in November 2019) Investigation Ongoing: The investigation is ongoing, with authorities continuing to gather evidence and build cases against those implicated in the murder. Timeline of Key Events
October 16, 2017: Daphne Caruana Galizia killed in a car bomb attack December 2017: Arrests of suspects, including Vincent Muscat, George Degiorgio, and Alfred Degiorgio November 2019: Melvin Theuma, a taxi driver and alleged middleman, receives a pardon and becomes a state witness March 2021: Vincent Muscat confesses to the murder in court August 2021: Prosecutors seek a life sentence for Yorgen Fenech July 2021: Independent inquiry finds Malta state responsible for Caruana Galizia’s murder Note: The investigation is ongoing, and new developments may emerge as the case proceeds.
Was anyone really stealing? The ads were served, right? The checks for the ads were paid.
I hate ads but their designed to be shown to people and intentionally using bots to inflate ad views is very clearly fraud. Silicon valley had something similar with bot farms to fake user engagement to take in VC funding. You take money in exchange for some kinda engagement metric which you’re faking.
Yeah. I’m totally cool with ripping off advertising companies.
Fuck them in particular.
Ah shit. You’ve got a legal point.
The ads were served, right?
No, and that’s exactly the point that makes it a fraud (not stealing)
Not /s sadly.
Just look at Bernie Madoff.
Looking at you Thomas Kincade. Investments my ass.
The same Bernie Madoff that died in jail?
Yes. He got locked up for stealing from rich people.
it’s because his name isn’t NVidia
Or Google/Reddit/Meta.
He didn’t get arrested for AI generated music. He got arrested for faking multiple accounts to upload music and using bots to generate fake listens, thus stealing millions of dollars. If he did the same thing with music he actually wrote and played, he would still be arrested.
Exactly. He “stole” millions from companies stealing billions, and thus was eaten.
Or screwed everyone over too little; if he had screwed everyone for ten billion he would be heralded as a genius.
Would been on the cover of Forbes.
I don’t think the illegal part has anything to do with the AI
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?
3rd sentence of the article:
Indicted on three counts involving money laundering and wire fraud, the Charlotte-area man faces a maximum of 20 years per charge.
If you follow the article to the press release:
SMITH, 52, of Cornelius, North Carolina, is charged with wire fraud conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; and money laundering conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Ah thanks. I didn’t follow to the release page and just skimmed the article, should have read closer.
Those are the charges yes, but how is this any different than what all sorts of corporations do
The difference is he was a poor trying to pull himself up. Corporations are glorious entities that can do no wrong in American law.
It’s fraud I’m assuming. They fake “plays” for Spotify to reward by sending payment, but these plays were people that did not exist. Spotify was paying for ghosts to essentially steam music
Facebook and other social media corporations use AI bots to generate “views” to inflate their traffic numbers to entice advertisers. They also use bots to piss people off and drive “engagement.”. Which is also fraud.
Its not wrong when a corporation does it its capitalism. When an individual does it its crime.
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”.
to head-scratchers like “Calorie Event,” “Calms Scorching,” and “Calypso Xored.”
As a fan of the Osees, those sound perfectly normal.
And he thought he could get away with it without bribing the politicians!
there needs to be a law that in order to sell something in a store a real person needs to examine it.
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/
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.
If he had been using the streams to train new AI bands, then that’s just using resources to develop a product.
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.
The guy sounds like a great entrepreneur.
If he already had millions in the bank the lawyers would have made this go away before anyone in the public would have noticed.
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.
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.
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.
