Criminally Exploiting AI Tools To Generate Illicit Revenue From Music Streaming

Uploaded on 2024-09-09 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Artificial Intelligence, GOVERNMENT-Law Enforcement, FREE TO VIEW

A US musician has been charged with using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and thousands of bots to fraudulently stream songs billions of times, so that he could claim millions of dollars in royalties.

Michael Smith aged 52, of North Carolina, has been charged with three counts of wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy charges. Smith allegedly concealed his actions by using fake names and employing a large network of individuals and technology to evade detection from streaming platforms’ anti-fraud systems.

Smith is alleged to have used hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs to manipulate music streams. The tracks were streamed billions of times across multiple platforms by thousands of automated bot accounts to avoid detection. Smith claimed more than $10m in royalty payments over the course of the scheme, which spanned several years.

According to the Indictment, Smith was sometimes operating as many as 10,000 active bot accounts to stream his AI-generated tracks. It is alleged that the tracks in question were provided to Smith through a partnership with the chief executive of an unnamed AI music company, dating from 2018. The co-conspirator is said to have supplied him with thousands of tracks a month in exchange for track metadata, such as song and artist names, as well as a monthly cut of streaming revenue.

The wider rise of AI-generated music and the increased availability of free tools to make tracks, have added to concerns for artists and record labels about receiving their correct share of profits made on AI-created tracks.

#Tools that can create text, images, video, audio in response to prompts are underpinned by systems that have been "trained" on vast quantities of data, such as online text and images scraped, often indiscriminately, from across the web.

Content that actually belongs to other artists, or is protected by copyright, has been collected to form part of some of the training data for such tools. This has generated outrage amongst artists, musicians and actors, who feel their work is being illegally exploited to generate seemingly original material, without due recognition or reward.

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