Technology

58115 readers

4871 users here now

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

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
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, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

1085

Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots (futurism.com)

submitted 1 week ago by ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

229 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

[–] PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 73 points 1 week ago (7 children)

How is this illegal? Sounds legit to me.

I use AI to answer ai generated emails at work all the time. I also use AI to design buildings that will never house people, but computer systems. It's all a shell game folks!!!

[–] Scolding7300@lemmy.world 33 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Probably the bots listening part. The point for the royalties is to get people to use the software and pay for it

[–] JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee 19 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Guess they'll have to shut down reddit since they have their analytics boosted by large amounts of bot activity.

The whole point of advertisers paying reddit for ad space is so people will see the ads.

[–] stom@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago

Reddit explicitly allow bots; Spotify does not - that's the difference.

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments (4 replies)