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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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[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 51 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

Futurama had it right, spammers are the ultimate destroyers.

[–] infinite_ass@leminal.space 3 points 2 months ago

Do they insert advertisements?

If so then the real fraud is false viewings of advertisements.

Which upsets the advertisers of course.