I am not sure I understand. Surely a AI generated song isn't a "fake song"? Is it a crime to publish an AI generated song?
It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?
He is not guilt of using AI to create songs.
He is guilty of creating a bot farm to stream his music, to increase his user count to earn royalties, which is fraud.
From what I've read they weren't AI generated songs of the kind that come to mind when most of us think of AI generated songs.
They were just simple short instrument loops (a basic drum machine beat, a short bass line, a few piano notes) repeating indefinitely, white noise, drones, and such.
Seems like a ToS violation more than anything
I agree thats more appropriate. There is nothing AI here, its just simple automation. Couple things that are probably applicable in this case or cases like this where royalties are earned based on assumed advertising traffic
1. There is no way he the the only one or first one. Chances are that more than likely he was subscribing to some third party services which were offering this feature.
2. He probably took it too far to get noticed and get in limelight
There's illicit enrichment so it's not like just getting likes.
When you deliberately violate a TOS using deception in order to get money or property from a service, you're committing fraud.
There are plenty of ways to violate a TOS non-remuneratively or without using deception ("deception" is an element of the crime of fraud and has to be proved up in court; it's not simply what the TOS says it is). Those are civil matters, not crime.
The template you want to be working from: lying for money is fraud.
Unless you are facebook, Musk, OpenAI, Antropic, Thiel, ...
That argument won't play at all in front of a judge. I'm commenting positively, not normatively.
If he used bots to stream his own song 80 million times then folks at the streaming services would notice. Instead he spread the 80 million fraudulent streams over tens of thousands of machine generated songs.
> Surely a AI generated song isn't a "fake song"?
Eh.
> Is it a crime to publish an AI generated song?
It's not. And a lot of this fraud was done with non-AI songs. But it helps show his attitude.
> It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?
Does that get them more money just for showing the ads? Usually the number of page views is up to you. If you find a way to make oodles of money off a mechanism like that, it very well might be criminal fraud!