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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@slrpnk.net 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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[–] PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 73 points 1 month ago (7 children)

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!!!

[–] Scolding7300@lemmy.world 33 points 1 month ago (6 children)

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

[–] JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee 19 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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.

[–] stom@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

Reddit explicitly allow bots; Spotify does not - that's the difference.

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