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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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[–] Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] LinusSexTips@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

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.