Man pleads guilty to $8M AI music fraud using bots
Michael Smith, a North Carolina man, has pleaded guilty to wire fraud after creating hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs and using bots to stream them billions of times across platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. The scheme earned him over $8 million in royalties, diverting funds from real artists. Smith ran over 1,000 streaming accounts, each playing hundreds of songs daily. Some tracks were made by uncredited musicians, but many were fully AI-generated. Prosecutors say Smith’s actions exploited a shared royalty pool, harming legitimate creators. He faces up to five years in prison and must forfeit the money.