Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots
Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots
An alleged scammer has been arrested under suspicion that he used AI to create a wild number of fake bands — and fake streams to with them.
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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He found a flaw in the system and exploited it. Although he didn’t do anything particularly wrong, the tools he used allowed him to do it. Yet, somehow he has to pay the consequences and the companies that made the tools to exploit the system are not liable. Got it.
America's darling Jeff Bezos exploited a flaw in his book suppliers policies to gain an unfair edge on competitors in the early days of Amazon. Best business man ever: give him the key to the city and a dick-shaped rocket ship.
He also got rich daddy and rich friend money to get money for his totally original and non-derivative idea of "selling things online". Maybe that's where this guy went wrong? No rich daddy?
They wouldn't be real capitalists (and boomers) if they didn't pull the ladder up behind them.
The "selling things online" idea had been tried repeatedly before Amazon, and always failed. What Bezos did was find a way to actually (eventually) make money at it. That was a business strategy tour de force that was quite impressively executed. That's not to say that Bezos is a good employer or a nice person. But it's often the case that it's not the originality of the idea that matters, as much as how it's executed.
I believe in a well-regulated market he wouldn't have found success like he did. Running for 8 years off of parents and VC/stock influx of millions of dollars screams anti-competitive to me. At the very least if we had decent privacy protection laws then the early data harvesting and business application probably would've been looked into at the start and shutdown, or else the company broken up from a monopoly once it started strangling whole sectors.
Umm... eBay was around before amazon and was largely successful. So no, he isn't a ground-breaker, nor am I suggesting eBay was either. And yeah you can talk about differences between their platforms but my point still stands.
All of these types "stand on the shoulders of giants" as they say. Except the giant is the taxpayer money that created the fertile ground that allowed their wealth in the first place. (E.g. the internet) And when they're sufficiently successful, they love pulling up that ladder you and I and everyone else paid for.
Private profits, public losses. Same as it ever was.
What.
If he used python for creating the bots, should python creators go to jail?
Nah he is saying the streaming services should fix their flaw / the guy shouldn't have consequences for what he did, as it was all inputted in a legal way it seems.
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.
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.
That’s the outcome that seems most logical. I want to see real artists get paid for creating real music. The current system is too prohibitive and unrewarding.
If an artist spends hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars creating their work, only to see a return of maybe a few dollars that’s a big problem.
If someone can use AI to game that same system for millions of dollars by creating loads of fake music in a fraction of the time; that’s a symptom of the big problem.
The current system of streaming just isn’t beneficial to artists. I imagine it’s not great for movies either. Yet, these companies are taking in HUGE profits. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to take advantage of a loophole.
If you think about it, it’s kind of like reverse piracy.
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'
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.
Exactly. The flaw is in the streaming service. They say “upload your music and make money” while skimming the lions share of the profits. But if they use tools that are openly available to all, i.e. generative AI (which uses copyrighted works for it generational algorithms) AND the Streaming service systems themselves, somehow this user is at fault because they don’t like the way he did it and the amount he uploaded. It seems to me it’s a problem with the system and not the user.
I think you're missing the key part of the problem. It isn't the AI that's the issue.
The problem is that he was being paid for how many listeners his AI songs got. But he used bots to "listen" to the songs. Nobody actually listened to his AI music.
The flaw in the system was that they couldn't detect his bots. (And the bots are not AI)
If money is people ( citizens united ish ) , Then playing this music 9ver speakers to your dollar bills would legally be a listen?
I mean I also agree that this seems like it shouldn't be illegal, but as per what you're saying, obviously people can use python for malicious intent, what do you mean?
I mean that creators of a tool shouldn't be liable for a crime committed with that tool. Unless the tool was purposely made for doing crimes.
Oh my bad I should've read more context
Only if Guido developed Python with the specific and exclusive intent being that it should be used for that purpose, and even then it wouldn't be an open-and-shut case. And since it was developed over 25 years ago, that's more than a bit unlikely.