US man pleads guilty to defrauding music streamers out of millions using AI

[Eugene]

Related: North Carolina Man Pleads Guilty To Music Streaming Fraud Aided By Artificial Intelligence (U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York)

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Source: The Guardian

US man pleads guilty to defrauding music streamers out of millions using AI

Michael Smith, 52, charged after flooding platforms with thousands of AI songs and boosting them with bots

Edward Helmore in New York
Sat 21 Mar 2026 15.14 GMT
Last modified on Sat 21 Mar 2026 19.13 GMT

A North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to defrauding music streaming platforms and his fellow musicians out of millions in royalties by flooding the services with thousands of AI-generated songs – and using automated “bots” to artificially boost the number of listens into the billions.

As part of a deal with federal prosecutors in New York’s southern district, 52-year-old Michael Smith pleaded guilty on Friday to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

The case against the Cornelius, North Carolina, resident is one of the first successful prosecutions of AI-related fraud in the music business, which is being hammered by fake music that threatens to swamp streaming services and deprive earnings from legitimately human musicians and copyright holders.

“Michael Smith generated thousands of fake songs using artificial intelligence and then streamed those fake songs billions of times,” US attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/21/man-pleads-guilty-music-streaming-fraud-ai

[3Hotdogs]

1. My neighbor, since deceased, was one of the original researchers into A.I. He worked at Bell Labs and was never in good

health. A.I. was going to be his gift to the world. His work is credited in Wikipedia.

Imagine if he was still alive to see how this worked out.

[GiqueCee]

2. The law...

... of unintended consequences writ large.