The FBI claims the musician created hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs, which were streamed for years by bots to accumulate millions in revenue.
The FBI has arrested a US musician for allegedly conducting an elaborate fraud scheme using AI and bots to steal $10m in royalties.
The US agency said Michael Smith used AI software to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs. The court case claims Smith then used automated bots to stream these songs billions of times.
The court documents say Smith conducted this scheme between 2017 and 2024. In 2018 he worked with the CEO of an unnamed AI music company and a music promoter to generate the vast number of songs needed to make this scheme work.
Based on emails obtained by the FBI, Smith avoided detection by creating thousands of smaller streams, as he was aware that streaming a single song massively would raise suspicion among the streaming platforms.
Smith estimated that he could use the massive amount of bot accounts to generate more than 661,000 streams per day on various digital platforms, to yield annual royalties of more than $1.2m. The songs generated by the AI music company were given randomly generated song and artist names before being streamed.
By manipulating these streaming figures with bots and tricking streaming platforms, the FBI said Smith was able to steal $10m. The 52 year old is facing charges of wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy, which both carry maximum sentences of 20 years in prison.
“Through his brazen fraud scheme, Smith stole millions in royalties that should have been paid to musicians, songwriters, and other rights holders whose songs were legitimately streamed,” said US attorney Damian Williams. “Today, thanks to the work of the FBI and the career prosecutors of this office, it’s time for Smith to face the music.”
As shown in this case, AI technology has the ability to generate massive amounts of content quickly. While beneficial for productivity, it can also be used to flood the internet with spam content.
Last year, various online magazines said their inboxes had been filled with AI-generated fiction, while hundreds of Amazon e-books listed ChatGPT as an author.
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