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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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[–] Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 months ago

Who's defending the streaming platforms?

[–] LordWiggle@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

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.