this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
1091 points (99.0% liked)

Technology

59777 readers
4723 users here now

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

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s
[email protected]
[email protected]
L4s
enu
1091
Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots (futurism.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology
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
[–] Snapz 26 points 2 months ago

Its subtle, but the tone of that article's coverage actually sucks... Is futurism a piece of shit?

What a waste of my tax dollars by the DOJ to try to recover spotify´s money for a broken system that they left open and are honestly probably exploiting themselves in parallel to inflate engagement numbers and take streams away from legit artists that they have to play. Remember, they want you in their app, they don't give a shit about actual music. If you'll just listen to random boops, they save cost in the middle. Not where I want the justice systems effort to go.