Man jailed after fraudulently making $8m from AI music using 1,000 bots — as Google reveals it’s watermarked…
- A man fraudulently boosted his music streams using an army of bots
- He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his actions
- He made over $8 million from the scheme across various platforms
A man has received an 18-month prison sentence after he used a horde of bots to help him rake in $8 million in royalties for his AI-generated music. He’ll have to forfeit all the money he made during his endeavor, which lasted from 2017 to 2024, but he managed to avoid a harsher punishment.
Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, uploaded hundreds of thousands of songs to streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music, then used over 1,000 bots to artificially inflate the listening statistics for his tracks to billions of plays. This netted him millions of dollars based on the platforms’ per-stream payment plans.
According to TechSpot, Smith admitted to...
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