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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 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Yeah but he is messing with rich people's money and that is a #1 no no. If he was scamming poor people no one would have cared.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I mean hopefully they'll drop the case, and fix the underlying issues to ensure the artists get paid, and the scams don't continue. The world isn't that nice though is it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This is what fucked Bernie Madoff.

If this person had gone to VC's with a pitch for 'AI listening model' with the explanation that "Now musicians can up load their songs to streaming services and AI will listen to make sure their pitch and tonality is accurate and that the beat is correct." or some bullshit like that. Then it would have been 'legal'

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

That would be a completely different piece of software. It didn't check their pitch or their tonality or their beat. It was barely an AI.

All it did was listened to the music.

So yes if he had written a completely different piece of software that did something completely different he could have pitched it completely differently and the outcome could have been completely different.