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

ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to Technology@lemmy.world – 28 points – Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots
futurism.com

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

Or screwed everyone over too little; if he had screwed everyone for ten billion he would be heralded as a genius.

Stealing is only wrong if you steal from rich people. It's perfectly acceptable if the victims are poor. /s

Was anyone really stealing? The ads were served, right? The checks for the ads were paid.

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.

I don't think the illegal part has anything to do with the AI

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

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.

Song names sound a lot like brands in the first three pages of an Amazon search results.

😐

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

No.

Music play-farming has been a thing for probably almost a decade by now.

Spotify divides the huge amount of money they get from subscribers each month, evenly among all the plays during that month.

Someone figured out ages ago, that since spotify has a free tier, that means that if you can get some tracks on spotify as an artist, you can then create an army of free-tier bot accounts and massively inflate the share of the money you get paid as an "artist".

Of course, this comes at the cost of everyone elses legit plays becoming worth less. Its an absolutely disgusting scam and Spotify has been ignoring it happening for years.

Adding AI generation into the mix is barely an innovation.

Edit: And if you're wondering how it works with services that don't have a free tier, it is done by hijacking peoples real accounts, then having them stream the relevant tracks over and over. Either by stealing entire accounts, or infecting devices that are already logged in with malware that will open the relevant app/website and play the tracks over and over.

The solution, to me, would seem to be to divide the revenue up on an individual basis instead. Does some sort of licensing issue prevent this? I'd think that the legitimate record labels would want to fix this loophole ASAP so that they can get more money.

AFAIK YT Music does this. The money from your subscription gets divided amongst whatever you listened to.

That still wouldn't address the stolen account problem, but yes, it'd be a huge improvement.

I have no idea why Spotify still sticks to this massively exploitable model, except for the fact that it MASSIVELY inflates their stats for investors and advertisers.

exceot for the fact that it MASSIVELY inflates their stats for investors and advertisers.

Ah yes, the Reddit strategy.

That's super cool to know. Seems more fair than the way Spotify does it?

I thought the same, but it's at the cost of real artists who are struggling to survive in a harsh market, so it still hurts. Sadly, this man isn't unique. There are many Spotify listening farms listening to fake artists with AI generated songs just over 30sec which is the minimal listening requirement to get payed. And Spotify does nothing, as they get more money too.

I can appreciate a well performed scheme or crime, but only if it steals from the rich and big corps. In this case, it steals from honest artists who give us amazing music while mostly being under paid on a regular basis, with the exception here and there.

Stealing from the poor is really low. Only the biggest assholes are capable of doing that. (looks at all the billionaires)

Ah. I thought this was an isolated incident. I understand, and agree with, your point.

You don't need those commas in that sentence. It makes you sound like Christopher Walken 😅

Lawsuit, sure, but is it actually illegal?

People who are not part of the wealthy elite stealing profits is illegal. Doesn't matter what the method was.

This is the truth. He would have been fine if he was super rich

And yet Xitter, Farcebook and similar platforms still publish their stats as if all their users are real human beings. So why isn't that fraud?

People who are not part of the wealthy elite stealing profits is illegal.

uh, yes? it's at the least fraud fs? the article says the doj is charging mike smith with three money laundering charges and one count of wire fraud. obviously the wire fraud charge comes from an argument that smith defrauded the distribution companies into illegitimately paying out royalties for false streams. note that the artificial intelligence solution only comes into the argument for the purposes of how he committed the crime, it really had nothing to do with the crime itself, at least intrinsically. if you read the press release from the doj, you can see that they make a pretty airtight argument that, quote:

SMITH made numerous misrepresentations to the Streaming Platforms in furtherance of the fraud scheme. For example, SMITH repeatedly lied to the Streaming Platforms when he used false names and other information to create the Bot Accounts and when he agreed to abide by terms and conditions that prohibited streaming manipulation. SMITH also deceived the Streaming Platforms by making it appear as if legitimate users were in control of the Bot Accounts and streaming music when, in fact, the Bot Accounts were hard coded to stream SMITH’s music billions of times. SMITH also caused the Streaming Platforms to falsely report billions of streams of his music, even though SMITH knew that those streams were in fact caused by the Bot Accounts rather than real human listeners.

SMITH’s hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs were streamed by his Bot Accounts billions of times, which allowed him to fraudulently obtain more than $10 million in royalties.

it is not illegal to lie. it is absolutely illegal to lie for the purposes of financial gain. sure, i'm not disagreeing that what he did could not somehow be construed as something of a robin hood character arc (even tho he most certainly did this for the purposes of his own personal enrichment). but he almost definitely is guilty of the wire fraud charge and i do have a strong feeling, based on the prosecutorial level of this case, the involvement of a specialized division of the fbi, and his purported co-conspirators; that the money laundering charges are ironclad as well. frankly, i'm hoping his co-conspirators actually do end up going to trial and we get to learn what the company that aided in his fraud actually was. on fucking god it'd be one thing if he ran this grift machine for a little while, paid off a lil bit of his debts and all, maybe even lived off of it. but to steal $10 million fucking dollars with it, even when he knew he was committing fraud and had to explicitly hide his criminal activity??? no shit the fbi was hot on your trail. what an absolutely, colossal dipshit michael smith must be. i respect the ingenuity but it is so blindingly obvious that 10 million dollars was egregiously too many times to press a "free money button" you just invented in a capitalist autocratic hellscape.

QUICK EDIT: i do just wanna say also i did not downvote u/shani66 and i just wanted to contribute to discussion. just noticed after i posted someone had downvoted them which is kinda goofy of whoever that is.

Just wanted to add something. Lying for Financial gain isn’t illegal it’s how you do it. Like people lie for Financial gain all the time.

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

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.

Try to overthrow the US government? You can still be president. Break a companies arbitrary TOS? Police are at your door to take you away for a long time.

That just shows which of these two roles hold a higher regard in US judicial system.

Honestly, what did he do wrong? He made crappy cheap music and listened to it using AI and bots. listening to it must have cost him subscription money, so I guess he just listened enough to get the songs popular enough so that other would listen, and they did and everyone made money.

Yeah, it's all cheap shit but it's wrong when he does it but totally fine when so many other media companies do it?

The bots faking real users' streaming to gain profit is the questionable part. AI generated cheap content (created en masse for profit) will be the norm soon. If you think about it, quality content is already the exception.

but totally fine when so many other media companies do it?

Do other media companies create fake streams?

Fraud is the crime of obtaining money or property by deceiving people. He deceived streaming platforms, as he botted his songs in order to earn royalties.

The whole "AI" thing is irrelevant; it'd be the same situation if he manually produced all his music.

Other media companies use bots to boost streams all the time. Hence the mostly shitty popular music of today. The kind of music you make does not matter today, how you market it or ‘boost’ it does.

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

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

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

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.

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!

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!!!

Probably the bots listening part. The point for the royalties is to get people to use the software and pay for it

Guess they'll have to shut down reddit since they have their analytics boosted by large amounts of bot activity.

The whole point of advertisers paying reddit for ad space is so people will see the ads.

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.

America's darling Jeff Bezos exploited a flaw in his book suppliers policies to gain an unfair edge on competitors in the early days of Amazon. Best business man ever: give him the key to the city and a dick-shaped rocket ship.

He also got rich daddy and rich friend money to get money for his totally original and non-derivative idea of "selling things online". Maybe that's where this guy went wrong? No rich daddy?

The "selling things online" idea had been tried repeatedly before Amazon, and always failed. What Bezos did was find a way to actually (eventually) make money at it. That was a business strategy tour de force that was quite impressively executed. That's not to say that Bezos is a good employer or a nice person. But it's often the case that it's not the originality of the idea that matters, as much as how it's executed.

Umm... eBay was around before amazon and was largely successful. So no, he isn't a ground-breaker, nor am I suggesting eBay was either. And yeah you can talk about differences between their platforms but my point still stands.

All of these types "stand on the shoulders of giants" as they say. Except the giant is the taxpayer money that created the fertile ground that allowed their wealth in the first place. (E.g. the internet) And when they're sufficiently successful, they love pulling up that ladder you and I and everyone else paid for.

Private profits, public losses. Same as it ever was.

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.

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.

Send me a link and I can get you to ~12 million and 1 listens.

Based on your numbers, ~260k plays per dollar. The person in the submission would have to get ~2600 billion plays to get $10 million.

Something doesn't seem right with those numbers.

There are people on forums doing the same thing as the person in the submission. 1 person with ~30 phones can generate about 15-20k streams in a day doing it manually.

Maybe some kind of increasing scale for revenue depending on larger numbers of listens.

My break down by track is pretty inconsistent, too. I've got a single track with over a million listen that made me 36 cents. My most popular track has over 4M listens, and it's responsible for half that $45. Distrokid doesn't say which streaming service that revenue comes from, either. Some pay more than others, I imagine.

Do you pay them any money to have the songs on the platforms?

If not, I wonder if they charge you a fee but only deduct their fee from your earnings. So if you don't get plays then they don't ask for money. And the break even point is at around 1 million plays. Just a theory of course; I'm sure it's all stated in the fine print.

I pay Distrokid ~$20 a year to distribute my music to a lot of streaming services, but I do not pay individual streaming services. I never really expected much return. I wasn't disappointed! Haha!

I was just curious about why 4 million plays is ~$20 and 1 million plays is less than a dollar.

The best I can figure is that the 4M$20 track was popular on a streaming service that pays better, and vice versa for whatever reason.