Mastodawn

A man used LLMs to generate hundreds of thousands of "songs", then used bots to stream them billions of times, to collect $8m in royalties. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-pleads-guilty-music-streaming-fraud-aided-artificial-intelligence-0 Is there a better metaphor for late-stage capitalism than burning resources to make songs that are never listened to, then steaming them to robots that will never hear them, ad infinitum?

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Gary

19h ago

@brucelawson it's more than a little bit Devil's Advocate, but I'm struggling to see how this is fraud other than that it cost Spotify $8m

The money certainly didn't get diverted away from other more deserving artists. (*edit* apparently it does, as Spotify no longer pays artists per stream, but as a percentage of overall streams). It's only Spotify that's out of pocket because someone gamed their broken business model.

Fuck 'em 😒

(But of course we all know who the US courts will side with)

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ShadSterling 19h ago

@WiteWulf @brucelawson haven’t courts ruled that “AI” slop can’t be copyrighted? Licensing music you don’t own the rights to sounds like fraud.

The part I don’t get is if he acted alone why was he charged with conspiracy?

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Charles A-M 17h ago

@ShadSterling @WiteWulf @brucelawson

I can imagine a scenario — in today's bizarro tech bro world where workers aren't "employees", drivers for hire aren't "taxis", and purchasing doesn't mean "owning" — where the terms of service of a Spotify type service treats their relationship with the content uploader as something other than "licensing" for tech bro technicality reasons.

Otherwise yeah, you can't license a work without holding its copyright, and this slop definitely wasn't copyrightable.

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Charles A-M

@ShadSterling @WiteWulf @brucelawson Here's the actual indictment, which describes his dealings with co-conspirators to pull off the scheme: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1366241/dl

It also makes it clear that the fraud is essentially violating the streaming services' terms of service where he agreed (by accepting the terms of service) not to artificially boost streams of the music he uploaded. Whether the work is copyrighted, or copyrightable, doesn't seem to be a factor in the case.