So why arrested? This is what AI is for right? Oh, he screwed over the wrong people didn't he?
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Stealing is only wrong if you steal from rich people. It's perfectly acceptable if the victims are poor. /s
Not /s sadly.
Just look at Bernie Madoff.
Looking at you Thomas Kincade. Investments my ass.
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Was anyone really stealing? The ads were served, right? The checks for the ads were paid.
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Or screwed everyone over too little; if he had screwed everyone for 10 billion he would be heralded as a genius.
Would been on the cover of Forbes.
it's because his name isn't NVidia
Or Google/Reddit/Meta.
He didn't get arrested for AI generated music. He got arrested for faking multiple accounts to upload music and using bots to generate fake listens, thus stealing millions of dollars. If he did the same thing with music he actually wrote and played, he would still be arrested.
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He was arrested because he faked a ton of information related to his accounts to make it look like many people were going it. I love that he games the system, but also it sounds like he totally committed financial fraud while doing so.
There are other people who have gamed the system without also committing fraud
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Fuck it. This scam was clever enough that I appreciate and sorta admire it.
No.
Spotify play-farming has been a thing for probably almost a decade by now.
Spotify divides the huge amount of money they get from subscribers each month, evenly among all the plays during that month.
Someone figured out ages ago, that since spotify has a free tier, that means that if you can get some tracks on spotify as an artist, you can then create an army of free-tier bot accounts and massively inflate the share of the money you get paid as an "artist".
Of course, this comes at the cost of everyone elses legit plays bwcoming worth less. Its an absolutely disgusting scam and Spotify has been ignoring it happening for years.
Adding AI generarion into the mix is barely an innovation.
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Y'know this guy seems intelligent enough to come up with this scheme, but not intelligent enough to keep a low profile. I honestly don't understand that.
Personally, I'd do the math to pay myself a living wage with this so that my actual work salary is nothing but a cherry on top; manage it so it seems like hype is ebbing and flowing in a natural way. If you ever figure out a way to break the system like this, you should never act in a way that draws attention to yourself.
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I thought the same, but it's at the cost of real artists who are struggling to survive in a harsh market, so it still hurts. Sadly, this man isn't unique. There are many Spotify listening farms listening to fake artists with AI generated songs just over 30sec which is the minimal listening requirement to get payed. And Spotify does nothing, as they get more money too.
I can appreciate a well performed scheme or crime, but only if it steals from the rich and big corps. In this case, it steals from honest artists who give us amazing music while mostly being under paid on a regular basis, with the exception here and there.
Stealing from the poor is really low. Only the biggest assholes are capable of doing that. (looks at all the billionaires)
I think you're confused about who got hurt by the scheme. Billion dollar streaming platforms fucking over artists don't need to be defended.
Who's defending the streaming platforms?
If you read my comment again, you can see I noted that Spotify is in on it. They profit too from these schemes. All those bots listening to 30sec AI songs playlists are running on Spotify premium accounts so Spotify won't do anything to fight fraud. They take 30%.
I never defended any platform, I only defended the artists. So I guess the confused one is you, my friend.
When I first read your comment about this scheme keeping money from artists I was skeptical. But, yup! It is right there on Spotify's website:
We distribute the net revenue from Premium subscription fees and ads to rightsholders.
Now, granted a bunch of those "rightsholders" are likely big corporate record labels but your point stands. The little guy is getting screwed, too.
Though, adding to your final thought, I bet if it was only the little guy getting screwed and not the corpos I bet DOJ wouldn't have cared.
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Calorie event?! Why not just call it a doughnut.
This is what Spotify was made for so I dont really see the issue. He made the music and the listeners, just look at that engagement you love so much!
Imagine something like a DDOS attack. But it's fans throwing AI listeners behind artists they love to boost them.
Imagine if fans shaped the music industry instead of the other way around?
Now you're playing with power
I firmly believe that VR won't have fully developed until we have power gloves that work like they did in those commercials.
People would very quickly figure out all the adverts being streamed to those accounts weren't translating into sales, and they'd know something was amiss.
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Unfortunate that he got caught. He was simply playing the same game the corps do but since he isn't mega rich he gets punished.
I don't see how this is money laundering or wire fraud. I hope he gets off. Or the real best solution would to make it so the revenue just goes to the artists the AI is ripping off.
My understanding is that the contractual agreement with advertisers is that they pay to reach ears. The ads did not reach any ears as promised which could be equated to fraud.
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Gonna miss having Zyme Bedewing on my Playlist.
I'm weirdly creeped out about how this article refers to him as "the man". Was this written by an AI?
oh look they care about it now it's affecting then
How is it illegal? And how much did it cost him to make it work I wonder.
most lilely money laundering. Not really a new scam just adding AI to an old one
It's not money laundering, they were creating fake engagement and getting advertising revenue out of it.
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The headline focuses on the wrong thing. Making a bunch of crappy songs and uploading the to Spotify and other streaming services is perfectly legal, AI or not.
The illegal part is that he created lots and lots of fake accounts that constantly streamed his songs and masked them to look like authentic listens. So much so that he was making $110k per month. That is straight-up fraud, which is what he was arrested for.
It has nothing to do with AI, but that makes more people click on the article.
Free him
"What are you in for?"
Indicted on three counts involving money laundering and wire fraud
Oops. Picked on the big dogs by playing their own game.
Seriously though, probably more going on than what we read here.
Maybe he broke terms of service with the streaming companies but they should be pursuing him in civil courts. This feels like abuse of the criminal justice system to retrieve money for companies that were negligent in how they were running their streaming businesses.
This guy produced music and he alsp streamed the music even if it was bots at industrial scale. He seemingly met the criteria needed to get money from the streamers. I'm not a lawyer at all but on cursory look at the definition and elements of wire fraud, I guessing this will hinge on whether this was a "material deception" - but he produced actual music and he streamed it, so is it?
Also i wonder whether it can be proven that the intent was to "defraud" rather than take advantage / game a system.
It feels like the tax payer is bearing the cost of prosecuting someone for a dispute between a person and the multi billion dollar music industry.
Also the music industry trying to paint this as theft of money from other artists is a bullshit - the streaming fees are supposedly divided out proportionately from overall streaming. He caused more streaming so the pot was bigger, and he took a proportionate share of that bigger pot. And any disproportionate sharing reflects the shitty practice's of the streamers and the big music rights holders who are essentially monopolies squeezing out the smaller competitors from the system.
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110K/mo was bound to attract attention. So, purely hypothetically, uhh, what would the lowest cutoff be before eyebrows start raising?
Try 50k, with more realistic artist names, and more varied song names. Then you can bump the number up subsequent months, with the occasional drop sprinkled in for realism.
A headline that wouldn't have been possible five years ago. Sick.
Of course it would have been possible. It would have been possible even like 100 years ago because we had the same alphabet and newspapers and headlines were a thing.
Aside from "ai" it was just as possible 5 years ago. There have been algorithmic random music generators around for at least a decade, and click bots have been around since at least the 90s
I would like that source code for… reasons.
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