0:00 they're like why the ████ I download Usher on Nap they chose like five people in the world to have crippling debt so that we would all be scared so sad and it didn't even [Music] work so a uh quote unquote musician you're going to like this cuz you're a musician hey you could relate was arrested for using AI songs and a bot Army to scam Spotify for millions of dollarss in royalty it's pretty smart it's gaming the system in place well I mean as long as you don't get caught right otherwise that's like really not smart but then like who's really getting caught here that guy or spotify's terrible it's against to oh yeah like they're both yeah you know how it's done so in do you know how it's done do
0:50 you know how you I do produ this already I know how to do it you're him I think anybody I think people are still doing this you are him cuz you get let me guess they just made like a million songs using Ai and then just put them up on Spotify and then paid yeah this guy Michael Smith he's 52 years old from Cornelius North Carolina allegedly used AI to automatically generate hundreds of thousands of songs that he then put on the streaming services like Spotify Apple music and Amazon music and then he's accused of using an army of bots to listen to the tracks that he created with no effort and likely no musical Talent which neded him over $10 million in streaming wow it's pretty good but but a 100,000 songs all being listened to by random Bots is crazy cuz AI could make a song every second yeah and AI could listen to that their own song every second it's
1:40 crazy is he in trouble for doing this oh yeah hey I can do vocals too like it can even sample song vocals from a song and then generate new vocals from that the crazy thing is it doesn't even have to be a song yeah it could be sound could just be yeah yeah cuz there's even the AI like they're not documentaries but they have that British guy or there's the there's like the voices like faceless videos online is and then they all use all guy makes really good music though that's the thing not like soulful music but it like on paper it makes really good EDM lowii all this really so all the LOI channels on YouTube they're probably a lot my roommate's a producer and he like came in and he's like yeah let me show you this and he's like he made a song using AI he's like for me to do that professionally it would probably take me like six or seven days and AI can do it in 2 seconds he probably
2:30 wouldn't have gotten caught if he just did it sporadically right like just only had one here a month one here and another well I think the irony is also that like just as you can have ai create music and then AI detect yeah there's AI detection as well and album art you can make unique looking look legit like biography everything yeah that that's the other thing you can make up fake artist aliases and biographies names everything so Smith has been indicted for with the US attorney of southern district of New York and the FBI call Brazen fraud scheme he's been charged with wire fraud conspiracy wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy for this how's he laundering the money if it's going straight into his bank account apparently the scheme dates back to 2018 when he partnered up with an AI Music Company and a music producer to mass produce an enormous catalog of tunes he
3:21 created several fake accounts to spread the music around so it wouldn't seem like one person suddenly could create fully produced tracks at rates faster than any known person in the history of mankind so I think there's definitely a uh a laundering element to like the falsifying of like accounts fake companies thing is I've seen like stories about Spotify doing this himself they make their own like fake Loi playlist with all their own Loi music that's made by Spotify and if you go to like the LOI playlist on Spotify you'll only find all these songs by all these artists you've never heard of and it's decent lowf mus they just pay themselves Spotify is circle jerking thems off so if I can do it for themsel but other people can't take advantage of it wow well that's fine because it's Spotify like you go to your own you know your own company to get your own company ████
4:11 but you're not frauding yourself yeah you're just frauding your customers right that's what kind of sucks is when you see how well that he did and how long it went it's like you're going to get so many copycat people by publishing the story that's he's been doing it for almost 10 years right no way yeah people going to do sounds like if he did it at like like just 20% of the capacity he wouldn't have got caught probably not yeah that's what I was trying to really do you think it's because he made too much or do you think the AI cost too much at once right like if he was like profiting let's say like only $30 $40,000 a month cuz yeah who are the top he did it over years though no yeah so basically yeah streaming services usually have fraud detection services in place but uh basically at every step he was somehow figuring a way to circumvent the detection he pulled it off by creating randomized song and artist
5:01 names that were convincing enough uh like calm Identity or zygotic wash and he probably use AI to come up with those band names it sucks to make that legit your band and you look it up and it's already an AI oh that is the nature of everything nowadays though everything's trademark blah blah blah domain names and stuff variety reports that a nonprofit group called mechanical licensing Collective which ensures musical artists get the royalties that they're owed from streaming streaming services confronted him 2023 they thought something smelled fishy so they looked into the billions of streams associated with him he denied wrongdoing but now he's facing up to 20 years in prison for each of the charges 20 years each of the charges and there's multiple charges for a white collar crime like that maybe cuz it's like I'm going to make an example you got you
5:52 lowkey do have to set the example using I think the charges are just that big to leverage a deal I don't think he's going to get sentence that much that's crazy I don't think he should get sentenced that much but at the same time if he just gives the money back that's also like not enough of a punishment to stop it moving forward right it's a statement maker I think for yeah cuz it's AI crimes is is kind of new so they need to set a presses remember what happened to the people that downloaded MP3s back in the day yeah dude that's true so that we could run someone's doing 50 50 to life right now cuz they downloaded something on Napster people yeah they're like why the ████ did I download ████ Usher on Nap they chose like five people in the world to have crippling debt so that we would all be scared so sad and it didn't even work it got well yeah then streaming services just came up yeah
6:42 this won't work either that's why it's like it's kind of like a a zero sum you know I just watched a Japanese movie that's like um it's kind of like the inventor of Napster out there he went through like some crazy ass Scandal and they're trying to um give him like life in prison and all that ████ calling him like a pirater and all that and they're just showing how corrupt the system was out there cuz they have like a 99 conviction rate and the officer just made them write a confession and sign it and then the guy's like this autistic nerd right so he just takes everything straight for what it is and then he goes if you do this it's just going to show that you cooperate and then we can deal with the rest at court and then he was like sure and then the lawyers basically
7:33 dissected it and proved that he didn't write that and he was coer to write it it it's some ████ up stuff but I'm like didn't we go through that too with um was it Zuck or the creative lime wire.com yeah kim.com mega upload yeah yeah yeah but that whole era there's hella people that got in trouble and it's not even even the Julian lass he didn't post that ████ Wikileaks is just a platform yeah the mega upload thing is probably one of the most saddest stories cuz that guy was just hosting data and because well because some people were using mega upload in order to Pirate material they didn't own it wasn't him it's just he's he's just the provider and because he wouldn't cooperate like he basically moved to a he like lived on his own Island and then they stormed it like
8:24 like they were storming a dictators yeah they took down his whole ████ the guy from mega upload who thought yeah is he in jail I don't know what he where he I I mean he's tweeting like he's he's like Jo he must be out anyone who gets raided on like a dictator Joe's following on Twitter so do you guys do you guys think we should be treating these people this way people who were like undermining the artist process and trying I mean if this was your company you probably would I probably would if it was my company cuz that's as a company that's what you have to do cuz your shareholders want you to do that type of thing cuz you're going to undervalue your own stock if you don't act on this ████ so I get it but as a society it's just we're all kind of all screwed you know what I mean like this is how like I said Spotify is doing it themselves they don't want you to do it but they're doing this themselves any with any music that doesn't have like a
9:15 vocalist on it they're like yeah we can get away with just pumping out a bunch of our own editorial playlists with our own music that just feed our own Spotify streams like this is like the uh Longhorn or was it was it called Longhorns the the the the strike that was going on for um all like Imports and stuff like that that happened and long shoran long sheman that's what Longhorns think about football team anyways uh and uh they wanted you know uh guarantees and Clauses in their contracts about you know slowing down um being replaced by AI or whatever with after strike and it's like at the end of the day that's not going to happen it will never another industry that is using it will replace you if you can use machines they will yeah so like if if it's true that even in things like Artistry if music gets that good as a
10:08 consumer and again not a music maker lowkey I'm not going to really care that much if I'm entertaining or if it's dope to the consumer has nothing to fear about it yeah so if that's possible then it's like yeah you won't stop this moving ████ Behemoth of a train you he can't do nothing I can still appreciate live music and concerts and performers and stuff that has nothing to do with it in one sense but it's not to say that like every song that you listen to all music has some sort of Purity element to it that needs to be consumed in that way you know most of our favorite pop songs were written in boardrooms by people so like there's so much magic gone if you take the curtain away from music in the first place yeah
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