“Although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole was real. Millions of dollars in royalties that Smith diverted from real, deserving artists and rights holders”: US Man pleads guilty to industrial scale AI fraud

Close up hand holds paper card with No AI, prohibition sign.

A North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to AI-related fraud – creating thousands upon thousands of tracks and then flooding the streaming platforms with them, generating billions of plays through automated bots.

As part of a deal with federal prosecutors, Michael Smith pleaded guilty on Friday (March 20) to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. So far he’s one of the few individuals involved in this sort of crime that the law enforcement agencies have caught up with.