today at 9:33 PM
> āMichael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,ā said US Attorney Jamie McDonald.
Super intelligence. Aha. :)
today at 10:25 PM
Nothing artificial in that.
today at 10:26 PM
so bizarre
today at 10:26 PM
"AI" is now an unword. The all-powerful delusional sociopath in the White House has decreed the latest bit of Newspeak, and the spineless cowards throughout the government are scrambling to make sure to stay in lockstep with The Party.
This U.S. Attorney is obviously frightened he'll be taken to re-education should he use banned terminology.
today at 2:14 AM
Hereās what bothers me: isnāt the United States a free market? What crime did he actually commit? Using services exactly as they are offered? It turns out that now, if you take advantage of the system as it was designed and gain a financial edge, you become a criminalābut if a major corporation does it, they just get a slap on the wrist.
today at 8:00 PM
>isnāt the United States a free market? What crime did he actually commit? Using services exactly as they are offered?
From the indictment:
>SMITHās streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024 and he executed it in three steps. First, SMITH created thousands of fraudulent accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the āBot Accountsā) that he could use to stream songs. Second, he used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream purported songs that he owned, which were generally created using super intelligence. Third, Smith collected royalties based on the fraudulent streams he orchestrated his own Bot Accounts to conduct.
>SMITH spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song, which would likely cause the Streaming Platforms to discover his scheme. At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts. As SMITH explained it in an email, he needed āa TON of songs fastā in order to circumvent the āanti fraud policiesā of the Streaming Platforms. To obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed, SMITH turned to super intelligence, which he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams.
So this isn't even "haha wouldn't it be funny if we make a 10 hour song that's just silence and then convince people to play it while they're sleeping", which would at least be vaguely legal. This is far closer to ad fraud.
today at 9:12 PM
I find this fascinating, actually. On one hand we must disincentivize fraud. On the other hand enforcement of laws really should have observable utility and not feel arbitrary. Iām much more on the āfix the modelā side of the spectrum on this one. That doesnāt mean I think we should allow what SMITH did.
I feel uncomfortable when we start handing out prison for things that are isomorphic in utility to things that seem clearly legal.
Which of these are fraud:
a) I block or skip ads in media I consume
b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume
c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads
d) I convince 1000 of humans to play my songs every day and all of them skip the ads
e) I program 1000 bots to play my songs every day
(b) (d) and (e) all have the same outcome for ad agencies, nobody hears the ads. If (e) is the only one thatās problematic, then we arenāt solving the problem by prosecuting (e).
Similar vein to Matt Levineās āeverything is securities fraudā takes.
today at 9:22 PM
IANAL, but...
>a) I block or skip ads in media I consume
>b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume
Not doing something is generally considered okay, even if it decreases someone else's revenue. eg. saying that a given product is a scam and not worth the money (assuming it's true). Same with skipping ads (eg. TiVo)
>c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads
>d) I convince 1000 of humans to play my songs every day and all of them skip the ads
Legal, because the whole point of advertising is to convince people to do something, even if it costs someone else money (eg. drugs, which might cost your insurance provider money). Where you might get into trouble is if the actions turn out to be fraud, eg. telling people to stream music, even though no one's listening to it, for the sole purpose of getting streaming minutes, or setting up a kickback scheme (might be tortious interference). Again, going back to the drug example, it's pretty intuitive. Advertising a drug? That's fine. Telling people to buy your drug, just so they can chuck it into the trash, for the sole purpose of enriching yourself? Probably illegal.
today at 10:29 PM
the difference is that (d) is not fraud and (e) is fraud, lol. Duh.
you seem to be thinking of the legal system like some kind of programming language / logic paradigm and it is not that and never has been
most likely ad-blocking would also be considered some sort of fraud (or rather: companies would block using their services if the ads were not seen, and then circumventing that would be regarded as fraud) except that it is not politically/socially tenable to do that at all.
today at 9:36 PM
Easy, (e) is fraud. The rest are legal. You can choose to not do something, advertising is analogous to convincing and advertising is legal.
Collecting money from a platform by making bots play songs you created is fraud.
Making bots listen to a song without any financial incentive is not fraud.
today at 9:52 PM
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today at 8:11 PM
None of this merits a prison sentence to me.
Should be a civil case. The readiness which with the United States incarcerates is a moral disgrace. Especially given the level of criminality the government itself exercises that goes unpunished.
today at 8:24 PM
>Should be a civil case. The readiness which with the United States incarcerates is a moral disgrace. Especially given the level of criminality the government itself exercises that goes unpunished.
So what's your actual argument here? Is it
1. whatever he did isn't wire fraud?
2. whatever he did is wire fraud, but wire fraud shouldn't be prosecuted, similar to how crashing a car isn't prosecuted?
3. whatever he did is criminal and should be prosecuted, but trump is abusing his pardoning powers so every other white collar criminal should be off the hook?
today at 8:43 PM
What part of doesn't merit a prison sentence escapes you?
I'll take all 3. It really doesn't matter. I don't want this person going to prison in my name. A criminal case is supposed to represent the public interest. A free society is meant to set a high bar to deprive someone of their liberty. The streaming platform can sue him if they like. A civil case that results in punitive damages is also understandable.
In my view, incarceration in this instance is a disgrace. The argument is a moral one, not a legalistic one.
Perhaps the statutes around wire fraud should be reformed. IDK it's not my area, and my argument doesn't rely on a legalistic interpretation, rather it suggests if the law's answer here is to put this person in prison something is wrong with the law. That is the argument. You seem to be asking me how would I codify the solution or else you have misunderstood me.
today at 9:25 PM
Justice is supposed to make sense for society not for the uber wealthy. No prison sentence.
today at 8:59 PM
Your argument: If somebody robs a bank, they did not harm society, the bank can just sue them to recover the money.
today at 9:08 PM
No? A bank is a regulated entity in the public interest.
Pointing a gun in someone's face is also not in the public interest.
Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin? It's not even clear to me without diving into the actual case where he went from getting an edge to engaging in the alleged crime. Or what he could have done differently to preclude criminal prosecution but could have still resulted in a civil case.
More importantly, why should he have to go to prison? Why don't you make that moral argument instead of engaging in such a misread of my position.
today at 9:55 PM
> Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin?
You don't seem to understand how the streaming revenue model works, and why this is an egregious fraud against the public interest. You believe that stream fraud is someone simply stealing from Spotify/YouTube/etc, so who cares.
In reality, all musicians share a pool of revenue across ads + subscriptions on each platform (typically two-thirds of the total, although each platform has a different rev share model).
This fraud only marginally impacts Spotify financials, as their cut is fixed and taken from the topline [1]. But someone abusing the system like this guy breaks the model for everyone. Not only you're stealing money from millions of musicians, but you're undermining the confidence in the whole industry.
I don't have an opinion if this merits jail time or not, but yes, this is pretty bad. Like money counterfeiting-bad.
[1] ps: of course, if this becomes rampant, musicians get screwed and turn against Spotify, so it's in their best interest to do whatever it take down the fraudsters. It's a never-ending cat-and-mouse game.
today at 10:19 PM
> Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who?
He used fraud to get a payout from Spotify. It's analogous to forging a check to get the bank to pay you money which you aren't owed.
today at 9:29 PM
>No? A bank is a regulated entity in the public interest.
What does this even mean? Only crimes against things are "regulated" should be prosecuted? Or "public interest", however vaguely that's defined?
>Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin?
Other artists. The subscriber/ad revenues are divided pro-rata (unclear whether it's by subscriber or across all subscribers), so by streaming a bunch of fake music, it's displacing the streaming minutes of other artists, ever so slightly.
Moreover, even if it is spotify that's losing money, how is it less in the "public interest" than banks? For the sake of argument let's subtract the threat of violence, and assume they hacked an ATM or something. Would that suddenly not be in the "public interest" to prosecute the offenders? Why should multi-billion dollar banks deserve more sympathy than multi-billion dollar tech companies, especially for crimes that in all likelihood won't lead to either company's demise?
today at 9:53 PM
> What does this even mean?
I take it based on your other comments that the distinction between criminal and civil proceedings is suitably apparent to you?
If so I struggle to understand then why this leap is so hard for you.
You and I can have a private dispute without the government getting involved as a prosecuting party, yes? Banks are highly regulated because the state has sought fit to take an interest in how they are run. Roughly, because if a bank defrauds its numerous depositors this incurs a societal cost. Similarly, violence is also regulated, as it is inimical to the state's requisite monopoly on violence to tolerate private expressions of this power.
I simply do not get the intuition here that it is in the public interest to put this person in prison in the same way the intuition may surface in these other cases. If you disagree that is fine, but then I'm curious to hear where your intuition on this private vs public interest line is. Of course it is somewhat vague. If the public interest was clear and obvious to everyone electoral politics would not exist.
Can you offer a positive moral argument for incarceration in this case? Surely you are aware of principles around the burden of proof? Since you seem to be on the pro criminal prosecution side here why don't you take up the burden of saying you want this man to suffer in prison for his crime? I understand your frustration that I don't have all the answers. It would be a more impressive indictment if I was willing to send people to prison under such circumstances.
I take the burden of depriving a fellow citizen of their liberty in a free society rather seriously.
Do you? If so, please explain to me how you alleviate yourself of this burden in this case. I'm open to being persuaded.
today at 10:25 PM
So going back to the ATM hacking example, do you think that's criminal or not? What if it's not a "regulated" institution, like an ordinary business? Say you scam Acme Co out of a few million dollars. Luckily for society, Acme Co is a trillion dollar company, so they could stand to lose that. The only harm is to its margins and shareholders, like you said earlier. Does that mean it's fine to hack Acme Co, worst case scenario I have to repay what I stole, and maybe pay their lawyer/cleanup costs?
If you can't clearly articulate what the "public interest" means, it just feels like this whole thing is just a long winded way for you to say that we shouldn't be prosecuting non-violent crimes, unless the victim is sufficiently sympathetic, in which case we throw the book at them. That's no way to run a justice system.
>Can you offer a positive moral argument for incarceration in this case? Surely you are aware of principles around the burden of proof? Since you seem to be on the pro criminal prosecution side here why don't you take up the burden of saying you want this man to suffer in prison for his crime? I understand your frustration that I don't have all the answers. It would be a more impressive indictment if I was willing to send people to prison under such circumstances.
You can make the same arguments about the questionable utility of incarceration for violent crimes too. The typical arguments against incarceration works equally well for violent crimes as they do for non-violent ones.
today at 9:29 PM
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today at 9:04 PM
Bank robbery typically involves violence or the threat of violence. I donāt think the two are really comparable.
To justify imprisonment (rather than purely monetary penalties or civil judgements) you really have to look at the relative scale of harm and the type of harm inflicted. Imprisonment doesnāt always make sense, there are many nonviolent crimes where a purely monetary penalty would be more appropriate. For one thing, imprisonment can prevent people from paying back the victim.
today at 9:37 PM
Not necessarily. One can walk into a bank, slide a note and a bag, and (hopefully) walk out. No threats involved. Still a federal crime.
today at 10:12 PM
I feel like you are missing the rather obvious or else the note implies. Luckily the law is not so rigid as to be hamstrung by such sophistry. I didn't assault you, I merely invited your face to make an acquaintance with my fist!
The reason the note works is banks don't want to pay the cost of having their employees getting their brains blown out. Passing a note with this understanding means one knows they are making a threat.
today at 9:34 PM
Are you fine with paying $50,000 a year to separate this person from society because he cheated some company? Are we really taking corporate personhood in this direction now?
today at 10:30 PM
Arguably he reduced the payout of real musicians by doing this, so he did harm real people too.
today at 9:47 PM
I donāt believe that people running this kind of scam are engaging in careful moral reasoning about acceptable victims. The man who did this would surely have stolen $50,000 from my grandma if he thought he saw a clever way to get away with it.
today at 8:28 PM
It matters who you're stealing from. And if you're undermining the system itself. This is why counterfeiting currency is considered such a serious crime. If I photocopy a $1 bill, I get, what, $1 for free? That's not that big a deal. But because having fake currency in circulation undermines the entire system, and thus makes for serious crime, so, too, does having fake listeners and getting rich of the royalties. Who cares if Spotify's CEO can't get buy forest in Sweden, in duping the system, it undermines the drive for real actual human people to create music that other actual human people want to listen to. That there are other injustices on the world doesn't undermine this injustice being addressed.
today at 8:51 PM
I simply don't buy that this is like copying a $1 bill.
And I don't think you do either. I think one could construct a suitably objective test that would relegate certain instances of this sort of fraud to the civil courts where I think they belong.
Part of the problem is conflating the private Spotify ecosystem with "the system" writ large. In any event, a civil case with appropriate punishment would serve to dissuade others from taking the same action.
What does adding a prison sentence accomplish?
today at 9:40 PM
today at 9:41 PM
It's like copying a $1 bill eight million times.
today at 9:27 PM
>To obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed, SMITH turned to super intelligence, which he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams.
He turned to what, exactly, Donnie?
today at 9:36 PM
> superintelligence
> AI
Same sentence even lmao
today at 9:31 PM
Is every retarded influencer botting their view counts to spread antisocial content in exchange for money liable like this?
If so, I think we can save America.
today at 9:32 PM
> ...which were generally created using super intelligence...
> ... SMITH turned to super intelligence...
Holy shit, we've got ASI?
Where do I go to invest all the money I have in this breakthrough!
today at 9:35 PM
This is a government renaming directive. Similar to how DoDefense is renamed to DoWar, or Gulf of Mexico is renamed to Gulf of America.
It was made up one day and that's what govt publications must call it now.
> Where do I go to invest all the money I have in this breakthrough!
You get it.
today at 9:38 PM
I knew it was something dumb, I just had no idea it was dumb at that scale.
today at 10:19 PM
The best part about all the insistence about it being the Department of War, is that Hegseth is still the secretary of defense
The original purpose of the org was also explicitly defensive, with failing to prevent Pearl Harbor being an explicit influence for improving communication and cooperation between arms of the military through a combined leadership.
It's like recursively, fractally stupid.
today at 8:06 PM
They actually used the term super intelligence.
I hate this timeline.
today at 8:30 PM
today at 8:11 PM
Article mentions they've been ordered to:
> āSuper intelligenceā is the term that President Donald Trump has ordered government employees to use in documents and statements in the place of āartificial intelligenceā.
Very disappointing.
today at 8:24 PM
Surprised it is not "Super Intelligence of America"
today at 9:19 PM
That's Lake Super Intelligence to you.
today at 8:32 PM
If he has access to super intelligence, he shouldnāt need to scam those poor corporations.
today at 8:21 PM
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today at 8:25 PM
The prosecutor is an employee of the executive branch, so use of that term is unfortunately not optional.
today at 8:53 PM
How much power does this actually have in the US? I remember here in the UK when Jacob Rees-Mogg (a man known for his dedication to traditionalism) required that his staff follow a fussy style guide demanding all non-titled men be addressed as Esq and to use imperial units. As far as I'm aware, it never stuck.
today at 9:08 PM
It has immense power over federal employees and exactly zero power over anyone else.
today at 8:01 PM
Generating the AI music wasn't illegal. Using bots to inflate /listens/ of an AI-generated song probably is against a platform's TOS, but isn't inherently illegal.
However, using bots to collect royalties on the songs generated definitely fits within the definition of wire fraud as he was using electronic communications (i.e., the internet), to carry out a scheme to defraud streaming services of money.
today at 9:47 PM
I donāt think the issue is the fact that the songs were AI generated as much as it is he faked tens of thousands of customers (presumably in free tiers) streaming the songs that he owned in order to collect royalties. That does indeed sound like garden variety fraud to me.
If you and I have a contract that Iāll pay you for unique shoppers referred to my store and you just go in yourself to trigger the door counter 10,000 times wearing different disguises, itās pretty clear that you have defrauded me.
today at 9:50 PM
> he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts
If you ignore the keyword optimizing buzz-catcher press release, thats the crime right there. He used stolen debit card numbers to sign up accounts.
today at 9:41 PM
Likely a ToS violation. But is this enough for a crime?
"āMichael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,ā said US Attorney Jamie McDonald. āBy flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans."
This state attorney does not seem to be the sharpest tool in the box or I don't get it.
1. I don't see any possible way how he could have stolen from the fans of the artists.
2. If he stole from the artists, then this must be a fixed amount of money in the pot and the slice of the piece of the cake gets smaller, if more people withdraw. There might be such an arrangement between artists and the streaming provider but I don't know details.
today at 8:08 PM
The crime is fraud, and if he was using the service as offered he wouldn't have thousands of accounts pretending to be different people.
Are any major corporations doing something similar to this, play-botting to get other people's royalty money?
today at 9:22 PM
Wasn't Brave browser caught replacing ads with its own? And the Honey extension replacing / injecting referral codes?
today at 9:27 PM
> And the Honey extension replacing / injecting referral codes?
Fraud in larger scale and using other people's computers.
Was it ever prosecuted with the same vigour?
It's a corporation so I'm gonna bet no.
today at 8:21 PM
> isnāt the United States a free market
No, far from it. A free market doesnāt have regulations, subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, etc.
today at 9:22 PM
The 'free' in free markets is a spectrum. A market without anyone enforcing limits will just coalesce to a couple large player(s), and won't remain free for long.
today at 10:08 PM
I think that's just called anarchy.
today at 10:07 PM
Fraud isn't a new concept.
today at 9:30 PM
> if you take advantage of the system as it was designed and gain a financial edge, you become a criminalābut if a major corporation does it, they just get a slap on the wrist.
You don't even need to be a major corporation to get away with it. You can be an individual if you have the right connections.
I believe what this guy did with the music streaming was wrong. But I also think whatever punishment he gets should be shared by someone who, say, lies about their 500 active user worthless company to unload it for tens of millions of dollars.
But one of these people is going to jail for a year and a half and one is preparing to launch a trillion+ dollar IPO.
today at 8:19 PM
> It turns out that now, if you take advantage of the system as it was designed and gain a financial edge, you become a criminal
Yes, exactly. Traditionally, fraud consists of lying to obtain something you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. This seems sensible, right?
But corpos have figured out how to abuse this - create a long list of business-method-desires in their "terms of service" (aka the legalese diarrhea that nobody reads). The corpos then take the position that merely by using their service as presented, users have take on responsibility for representing that they will abide by the listed whims. When it turns out that users' interests differ from the corpo's whims, and a user does something they majorly don't like, they cry fraud.
In the past, this was limited by the facts that 1. legalese diarrhea wasn't really involved in day to day transactions (we relied on legislative law made by public bodies rather than private law unilaterally promulgated by corpos) and 2. when you bought something, the seller's control over it simply ended. Both of those assumptions have been blown away by pervasive communications, and we really need some reform here.
today at 9:22 PM
from the article, the crime was that he thought about using a payment system to transfer misrepresented income
> SMITH pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud
the department of justice made a sophisticated music-themed plot around it because the only crime they had was too dumb
today at 7:54 PM
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today at 7:57 PM
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today at 8:02 PM
Using bots to defraud the platforms and get royalties he didnāt actually earn sounds like a crime to me, but what do I know. Maybe I should just make a Trump joke.
today at 8:03 PM
I am not sure I understand. Surely a AI generated song isn't a "fake song"? Is it a crime to publish an AI generated song?
It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?
today at 8:12 PM
He is not guilt of using AI to create songs.
He is guilty of creating a bot farm to stream his music, to increase his user count to earn royalties, which is fraud.
today at 8:20 PM
today at 8:11 PM
Seems like a ToS violation more than anything
today at 8:18 PM
I agree thats more appropriate. There is nothing AI here, its just simple automation. Couple things that are probably applicable in this case or cases like this where royalties are earned based on assumed advertising traffic
1. There is no way he the the only one or first one. Chances are that more than likely he was subscribing to some third party services which were offering this feature.
2. He probably took it too far to get noticed and get in limelight
today at 8:54 PM
There's illicit enrichment so it's not like just getting likes.
today at 9:08 PM
When you deliberately violate a TOS using deception in order to get money or property from a service, you're committing fraud.
There are plenty of ways to violate a TOS non-remuneratively or without using deception ("deception" is an element of the crime of fraud and has to be proved up in court; it's not simply what the TOS says it is). Those are civil matters, not crime.
The template you want to be working from: lying for money is fraud.
today at 9:12 PM
Unless you are facebook, Musk, OpenAI, Antropic, Thiel, ...
today at 9:22 PM
That argument won't play at all in front of a judge. I'm commenting positively, not normatively.
today at 9:11 PM
If he used bots to stream his own song 80 million times then folks at the streaming services would notice. Instead he spread the 80 million fraudulent streams over tens of thousands of machine generated songs.
today at 8:17 PM
> Surely a AI generated song isn't a "fake song"?
Eh.
> Is it a crime to publish an AI generated song?
It's not. And a lot of this fraud was done with non-AI songs. But it helps show his attitude.
> It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?
Does that get them more money just for showing the ads? Usually the number of page views is up to you. If you find a way to make oodles of money off a mechanism like that, it very well might be criminal fraud!
today at 9:07 PM
When has any Facebook executive ever gotten a prison sentence for their horrendous doings? They just pirated all of Anna's Archive to feed into their AI.
Our legal system has been turned into a tool to punish the poor and enrich the wealthy.
today at 9:10 PM
Meta, Google and Apple are all currently claiming immunity in court for the explicitly illegal stuff they distribute and profit from - from scam ads and apps to illegal gambling apps.
today at 9:25 PM
> has been turned into a tool to punish the poor and enrich the wealthy.
was it ever othrewise?
today at 9:53 PM
Iām up for anyone and everyone pointing it out until itās fixed. Which is hopefully one step on the path to action, which is on the path to change, and eventually resolution. Justice and fairness will be an ever present battle or at least vigilance.
today at 9:44 PM
If Spotify royalties were allocated fairly a scheme like this shouldn't be able to pull more money out than the subscriptions put in.
today at 8:22 PM
Oh lord. āSuper Intelligenceā
So the agencies are forced to pretend every ridiculous thing their king says is a great idea.
today at 8:14 PM
> By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans. This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud.
He certainly didnāt defraud artists or their fans. This is false framing. He defrauded the streaming platform, which Iām sure the jury would be far less empathetic towards.
today at 8:16 PM
The money he got came from the same shared pool that the other artists get money from.
today at 8:28 PM
This is true, but kind of on the streaming platforms for having a terrible pooled monetization scheme that lets high frequency users allocate the subscription money of low frequency users.
today at 8:22 PM
> At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts
I gather these are cards that he opened and funded, not stolen cards. I'm surprised at this scale it wasn't detected much sooner.
These accounts had to be listening a lot in order to generate more royalties than the subscription fees. e.g. Spotify family is $21.99/mo for six accounts. That's $440K annually for 10,000 accounts. Sheesh.
today at 8:02 PM
The part saying he robbed streams from legitimate artists and fans is quite stupid but expected in a case like this.
today at 8:12 PM
It says he robbed royalty payments which is true because of the way most of these services distribute royalties. All listens go into a global pool and count the same amount. So if you listen 20 hours a day, you control not only the royalty payments from your subscription but the royalty payments from several other people's subscriptions.
today at 8:09 PM
If there was a sane payment system for spotify it would be literally impossible for that to be the case.
today at 8:21 PM
The AI is incidental to the story. The fraud is the fake streams for money.
today at 8:38 PM
today at 10:27 PM
Now do they go after ad click farms?
today at 8:51 PM
the crime isnt the AI music its the fake views isnt it? i hate how the titles are being framed here
today at 8:47 PM
"Taylor Swift received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams in April 2023., In the same month, Smithās bot accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times."
what always fascinates me about crime like this is, if this guy hadn't tried to make 8 million dollars with 10k bot accounts and boosted himself straight to the top, he could have easily made a few thousand per month. How are people clever enough to set this scheme up to begin with but don't consider that you maybe shouldn't try to alert the entire fraud department
today at 9:04 PM
which is to say there probably is someone out there who is committing this crime and being less greedy and getting away with it.
today at 8:14 PM
Sam Altman is hiding tons of evidence of OpenAI's crimes. DOJ please investigate
today at 8:18 PM
This arrest was in 2024. This is the last remnants of a justice system being sunsetted.
today at 9:37 PM
today at 9:11 PM
I wonder if he would have gotten away with it if only he had stayed under well the radar.
today at 9:02 PM
A digital society takes the value out of a place. There was a time when, if you did not Show Up, you were always alone.
today at 1:51 AM
DOJ source: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-sent... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49995378)
today at 8:09 PM
How is that not protected by the first amendment?
today at 8:11 PM
He was doing it fraudulently to make money.
today at 8:13 PM
I thought using bots in a misleading and inauthentic way was free speech. What about Elon's stock pumping twitter bots?
today at 8:15 PM
That may be true by itself. However, misleading and inauthentic speech to make money is fraudulent and illegal.
today at 8:16 PM
Who said those are legal? I'm sure that could be securities or wire fraud.
today at 8:23 PM
I'd like to read more about this court case
today at 9:21 PM
> SMITH pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud
I need this guyās lawyer
today at 8:22 PM
Imagine showing this headline to someone in the 80s or before.
today at 7:53 PM
Part of this does seem objectionable. But uhh, the other half, yikes. Superintelligence: ok for capital, not allowed for individuals.
> "Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,ā said U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald. āBy flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans. This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud."
Wow, uh, he had a time machine?
> Smithās streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024
today at 8:35 PM
Won't somebody please think of the artists? /s
People here in HN seem to believe that royalty collecting companies are some sort of charitable organizations for the benefit of the artists. But their conduct and practices range from questionable [1] to outright fraudulent [2]. And now they manage to fly below the radar, because everyone (artists included) is busy bashing Spotify. These companies would sue Spotify out of existence had they offered the option to directly pay the artists instead of going through them.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/1302np/jasrac_this_i...
[2] https://torrentfreak.com/huge-scandal-engulfs-greek-anti-pir...
today at 8:23 PM
Feels like this is missing the bigger story, that this guy was using ai (AI!) to generate music in 2017-2024! /s
today at 8:23 PM
Genuine question: what if my agents produce better output if I stream audio to them while they work? Is that fraud?
today at 7:58 PM
Feels like some kind of sentence to make an example of someone to scare off other people ala going after grandmas for napster. There's way too much of this going on on instagram and tiktok etc etc already. They went after this guy but is letting many people get away with it.