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.
It’s fraud by false representation the U.K. Fraud is basically whenever you misuse a system for undue profit. The terms are very broad. “You know it when you see it” kind of thing.
Its theft, which is against the law to do against a company or person. Its similar to trading in empty boxes at GameStop or sending back boxes full of rocks to amazon.
Although most people seem to just pick a side based on whether they think that company should exist or not.
Try to overthrow the US government? You can still be president. Break a companies arbitrary TOS? Police are at your door to take you away for a long time.
I cannot imagine how stupid someone would have to be to actually think what you just said means anything of consequence and I'm possibly one of the stupidest blokes on Lemmy.
Yeah I read another article on this and it's very unclear what was illegal. If I had to guess they're getting him on the technicalities of the process rather than on the actual streaming.
Edit: so I looked it up and realized wire fraud is "electronic" fraud, not bank wiring - Online definition
Which given the way the guy did it definitely seems to meet that definition.