Technology

70415 readers

3351 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related news or articles.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

1093

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]

191 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [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.