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.
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.
Would been on the cover of Forbes.
it’s because his name isn’t NVidia
Or Google/Reddit/Meta.
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
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
This is going to be something like fraud, larceny, etc.
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?
Fuck Spotify, they can eat a bag of dicks after renewing Joe cum-guzzling Rogan for $200million. They deserve to have all of their money stolen.
Spotify is losing nothing. They take their cut either way.
The only people getting their money stolen are real artists. Their share of the income shrinks as these scammers inflate the number of plays that the money is shared between.
I didn’t realize it was a thing. Thanks for taking the time to explain!
It seems like it would be super easy for them to close this loophole. If you use the model that free tier listeners (real ones) will listen to about the same distribution of songs as the paying listeners, then just stop counting all free tier listeners and multiply the amount paid out for the pay-tier listeners by an appropriate factor to make payouts the same as before.
Y’know this guy seems intelligent enough to come up with this scheme, but not intelligent enough to keep a low profile. I honestly don’t understand that.
Personally, I’d do the math to pay myself a living wage with this so that my actual work salary is nothing but a cherry on top; manage it so it seems like hype is ebbing and flowing in a natural way. If you ever figure out a way to break the system like this, you should never act in a way that draws attention to yourself.
I imagine quite a few folks have done this. You don’t hear about everyone that got away with it but you definitely hear about those that get caught.
It’s like the person who figured out the free gas card hack and let her friends use it. If she’d kept it herself, she’d still get free gas.
If you ever figure out a way to break the system like this, you should never act in a way that draws attention to yourself.
There was a guy who robbed banks and he wasn’t caught for decades because he just lived an ordinary working-class lifestyle. Cheap little apartment, no fancy car etc. etc.
Once you have to put that amount of effort and attention in for a reasonable income… you are just doing a job… a job no-one benefits from. So it won’t be satisfying to do. No longer beating the system, just beating yourself.
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 😅
I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription, is more cowbell.
When I first read your comment about this scheme keeping money from artists I was skeptical. But, yup! It is right there on Spotify’s website:
We distribute the net revenue from Premium subscription fees and ads to rightsholders.
Now, granted a bunch of those “rightsholders” are likely big corporate record labels but your point stands. The little guy is getting screwed, too.
Though, adding to your final thought, I bet if it was only the little guy getting screwed and not the corpos I bet DOJ wouldn’t have cared.
See this video for more info about these scams and how Spotify is enabling them and protects them.
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I think you’re confused about who got hurt by the scheme. Billion dollar streaming platforms fucking over artists don’t need to be defended.
Who’s defending the streaming platforms?
If you read my comment again, you can see I noted that Spotify is in on it. They profit too from these schemes. All those bots listening to 30sec AI songs playlists are running on Spotify premium accounts so Spotify won’t do anything to fight fraud. They take 30%.
I never defended any platform, I only defended the artists. So I guess the confused one is you, my friend.
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.
Show me where in the article it says he was arrested for a TOS violation.
Rent free…
Well, of course. A president attempting to overthrow the government is a huge deal, you fetid fucking moron.
But nuthin hayuh-pinned! It wuz aint teefuh! Reeuhnt freeee…
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Interesting instance.
It might be because I’m drunk, but Trump-posting from “lemmy.packitsolutions.net” is genuinely hilarious. It’s giving Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
What law is being broken here?
He stepped onto the rich people’s turf. We plebs are supposed to stay in our thatch huts beyond their line of sight.
Straight to jail.
It’s fraud by false representation the U.K. Fraud is basically whenever you misuse a system for undue profit. The terms are very broad. “You know it when you see it” kind of thing.
I’m not a lawyer but this sounds like a pretty textbook definition of fraudulent business practice to me.
I would assume it is Fraud
Not sure how this is a crime… breach of TOS, sure, but a crime?
What law is being broken here?
Not curious enough to actually read the article, eh?
Indicted on three counts involving money laundering and wire fraud
One may argue about money laundering but it’s pretty clearly fraud.
That’s just a generic indictment. And it’s allegedly. How do you perform wire fraud if a corporation legally paid you for a service?
Yeah I read another article on this and it’s very unclear what was illegal. If I had to guess they’re getting him on the technicalities of the process rather than on the actual streaming.
Edit: so I looked it up and realized wire fraud is “electronic” fraud, not bank wiring - Online definition
Which given the way the guy did it definitely seems to meet that definition.
Its theft, which is against the law to do against a company or person. Its similar to trading in empty boxes at GameStop or sending back boxes full of rocks to amazon.
Although most people seem to just pick a side based on whether they think that company should exist or not.
There are far too many loopholes for me not to hate companies be they small or large.
In Australia, “family trusts” are a sure way to write off a good chunk of your expenses (groceries, fuel and so on) while paying yourself a wage. If you really want you can cook the books taking cash sales for yourself too.
Don’t forget about “taking” whatever you want from the company, and writing that off as a loss.
Maybe I should hate people, but in a vacuum people are reasonable, logical and honorable. But once we introduce a “well maybe” or an “but what if I were to purchase fast food and disguise it as my own cooking?” my view of people becomes skewed.
I guess, I wanted to vent about how fucked everything seems to be and that I feel powerless to do anything about it. GameStop as a company probably deserve the rocks in boxes, Amazon deserve them too, all because people are running those companies.
I’m not above greed, but I’d like to think / feel that I put out more than I take and it seems quite uncommon in our modern society.
People will use whatever tools available to them. If their community supports it they will do it publicly, if not they will hide it. Drug use is a great example in some cases.
If Australia allows people to convert their families to a company just to avoid taxes, then thats on the government to fix, not the people to stop doing.
As long as there is no UBI there will always be pressure to use all tools available when things get hard.
Gaining money from someone else by lying and/or deception. The legal term for that is fraud-- in this case, wire fraud.
What law is being broken here?
The law of “don’t take money from the rich and powerful; only they take
theiryour money”.
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/
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?
They wouldn’t be real capitalists (and boomers) if they didn’t pull the ladder up behind them.
This is hard to verify on Google. What did he do?
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.
I believe in a well-regulated market he wouldn’t have found success like he did. Running for 8 years off of parents and VC/stock influx of millions of dollars screams anti-competitive to me. At the very least if we had decent privacy protection laws then the early data harvesting and business application probably would’ve been looked into at the start and shutdown, or else the company broken up from a monopoly once it started strangling whole sectors.
What.
If he used python for creating the bots, should python creators go to jail?
Nah he is saying the streaming services should fix their flaw / the guy shouldn’t have consequences for what he did, as it was all inputted in a legal way it seems.
Yeah but he is messing with rich people’s money and that is a #1 no no. If he was scamming poor people no one would have cared.
I mean hopefully they’ll drop the case, and fix the underlying issues to ensure the artists get paid, and the scams don’t continue. The world isn’t that nice though is it.
That’s the outcome that seems most logical. I want to see real artists get paid for creating real music. The current system is too prohibitive and unrewarding.
If an artist spends hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars creating their work, only to see a return of maybe a few dollars that’s a big problem.
If someone can use AI to game that same system for millions of dollars by creating loads of fake music in a fraction of the time; that’s a symptom of the big problem.
The current system of streaming just isn’t beneficial to artists. I imagine it’s not great for movies either. Yet, these companies are taking in HUGE profits. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to take advantage of a loophole.
If you think about it, it’s kind of like reverse piracy.
This is what fucked Bernie Madoff.
If this person had gone to VC’s with a pitch for ‘AI listening model’ with the explanation that “Now musicians can up load their songs to streaming services and AI will listen to make sure their pitch and tonality is accurate and that the beat is correct.” or some bullshit like that. Then it would have been ‘legal’
That would be a completely different piece of software. It didn’t check their pitch or their tonality or their beat. It was barely an AI.
All it did was listened to the music.
So yes if he had written a completely different piece of software that did something completely different he could have pitched it completely differently and the outcome could have been completely different.
Exactly. The flaw is in the streaming service. They say “upload your music and make money” while skimming the lions share of the profits. But if they use tools that are openly available to all, i.e. generative AI (which uses copyrighted works for it generational algorithms) AND the Streaming service systems themselves, somehow this user is at fault because they don’t like the way he did it and the amount he uploaded. It seems to me it’s a problem with the system and not the user.
I think you’re missing the key part of the problem. It isn’t the AI that’s the issue.
The problem is that he was being paid for how many listeners his AI songs got. But he used bots to “listen” to the songs. Nobody actually listened to his AI music.
The flaw in the system was that they couldn’t detect his bots. (And the bots are not AI)
If money is people ( citizens united ish ) , Then playing this music 9ver speakers to your dollar bills would legally be a listen?
I mean I also agree that this seems like it shouldn’t be illegal, but as per what you’re saying, obviously people can use python for malicious intent, what do you mean?
I mean that creators of a tool shouldn’t be liable for a crime committed with that tool. Unless the tool was purposely made for doing crimes.
Oh my bad I should’ve read more context
Only if Guido developed Python with the specific and exclusive intent being that it should be used for that purpose, and even then it wouldn’t be an open-and-shut case. And since it was developed over 25 years ago, that’s more than a bit unlikely.
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.
Searching my username should do it. Not sure what streaming services you’re subscribed to. It’s all on YouTube, too.
How obvious is it that it’s a bot?
Me? Honestly, I think it would be obvious to any discerning listener what music is actually made by a person, and what music is AI generated, but really, there’s so much music out there of wildly varying quality thanks to accessibility of production tools these days, it probably is literally impossible to tell the difference anymore.
I think it would be obvious to any discerning listener what music is actually made by a person
I’m not so sure anymore. Udio’s output is more obvious but Suno has gotten scarily good. I’ll still always crave the human element though and I make my music for myself.
I have ~12 million listens across various streaming services
The great thing about bots is that they can listen to every song on file, 24/7/365, and you can spin up as many of them as you like. 12 million is nothing.
I have to wonder about the logistics. He can’t be running them on his own single Internet connection. Or could VPNs handle it so it would appear his listens are coming from all over the world? $10M is a lot of money. How long did it take to amass that?
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.
Humble brag alert
A little bit, for sure. Tempered harshly by the fact I’ve spent thousands of hours and thousands of units of cash on a hobby that paid me back $45. Good thing I don’t do it for the money!
I was just kidding. I’m very jealous. I’ve spent thousands and have nothing to show for it. Maybe a hundred bucks from live shows 20 years ago.
That’s more than $45!
I got free beer at a show once 20+ years ago, too.
The most money I ever made in the music industry was being part of a class action lawsuit against MTV. Record sales and live shows are nothing.
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.
If the ad agencies don’t like that then yeah they should fine Reddit or get compensated for Reddit claiming they’re more popular than they are. I don’t see the counterpoint
(Unless it wasn’t a counterpoint)
It was more or less a throw away comment pointing out that rich people and corporations don’t get legally held accountable for the same transgressions the same way normal people do.
Rules for thee but not for me with this crap is getting tiresome.
Reddit explicitly allow bots; Spotify does not - that’s the difference.
Reddit explicitly allow bots; Spotify does not - that’s the difference.
Should just be fraud right?
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?
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.
he botted his songs in order to earn royalties.
So if the listens were natural there would no case?
At least, not this case. AI music is its own can of worms that hasn’t been decided on in court or law yet.
But the main issue in this case is that he was scamming listens from the music services. So if he’d just let people naturally discover the AI songs somehow, and he earned money just like other Music publishers, then he would’ve been fine.
Yeah, it’s an exploit but it doesn’t seem illegal. It seems like the issue is with whatever service. They need to fix their contract or their software. Maybe it is in the contract or EULA that you can’t do this sort of thing already though, in which case it’s fair game.
Exactly, I don’t think there was anything illegal here. At best it’s breach of contract with Spotify or whoever, and they could get sued. MAYBE there’s some interpretation of fraud that could apply? But it’s not like he sold anything and misrepresented it.
Maybe it is in the contract or EULA that you can’t do this sort of thing already though
Then that would be a civil matter and he wouldn’t have been arrested for it.
I mean, being arrested doesn’t mean a crime was committed. It means he’s accused of a crime. I’ll be interested to see if there is actually a conviction in the end.
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.
oh look they care about it now it’s affecting them
i mean this is the system we got set up isnt it?
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
<play rock guitar riff>
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.
^
Futurama had it right, spammers are the ultimate destroyers.
Do they insert advertisements?
If so then the real fraud is false viewings of advertisements.
Which upsets the advertisers of course.
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.
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.
Based
As fuck. Use the system they built against them. All day.
Indeed, this is what we called “Okay, now that you’re using the loophole against us instead of the other way around… We don’t like it anymore.”
Nooo that’s ours to exploit stop ittt 😤
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.
😐
Can I interest you in a FCVTRHJR HDMI cable?
