A 54-year-old man in the United States has been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for using thousands of automated accounts to generate billions of fake streams of AI-generated songs and fraudulently obtain more than US$8 million in royalties.
Michael Smith, from Cornelius, North Carolina, was sentenced by a federal court in Manhattan after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Prosecutors said Smith used a network of automated accounts, commonly known as bots, to stream hundreds of thousands of songs generated with artificial intelligence on platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music between 2017 and 2024.
The artificial streams made the songs appear more popular than they were, allowing Smith to collect royalties that would otherwise have been distributed to legitimate artists and rights holders.
According to the United States Department of Justice, Smith’s bot accounts generated billions of streams. In April 2023, for instance, his accounts generated 80.9 million streams of his AI-generated music on YouTube Music through family-plan accounts.
The same month, Taylor Swift’s entire catalogue received 9.3 million streams through family-plan accounts on the platform, prosecutors said.
In addition to the prison sentence, Smith was ordered to forfeit US$8,091,843.64 and will serve two years of supervised release after his imprisonment.