Man who made $8 million using AI-generated songs and an army of streaming bots gets 18 months in prison
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What just happened? Remember the case of Michael Smith, the man who uploaded hundreds of thousands of AI-generated music tracks and used an army of over 1,000 bots to repeatedly stream them, conning music services out of $8 million? He's just been sentenced for his crime. He's going to prison for 18 months and has to forfeit the money, but it could have been worse.
According to court documents, Michael Smith, of Cornelius, North Carolina, worked with co-conspirators between 2017 and 2024 to fraudulently inflate plays of AI-generated music on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube.
To reduce the risk of detection, Smith spread the automated plays across hundreds of thousands of AI-generated tracks obtained from a co-conspirator. This kept individual songs from accumulating suspiciously large numbers of streams.
The music was...
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