Bruce Lawson ✅ ♫ ♿ ✌️♂️✊20h ago
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?
Show threadGary 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)

Show threadAlessandro Corazza 🇨🇦19h ago

@WiteWulf

Yeah, same - at worst this seems a violation of Spotify ToS for siccing fake listeners on their servers. Nothing was taken from other artists, and Spotify allowed him to upload the deluge of AI slop tracks in the first place.

@brucelawson

Show threadTor Iver Wilhelmsen18h ago
@alessandro @WiteWulf @brucelawson The court, obviously, disagreed with your whitewashing of the fraud.
Show threadAlessandro Corazza 🇨🇦18h ago

@toriver

The Court siding with corporate interests doesn't mean this was an accurate interpretation of the law. I'd like to see their rationale.

If the issue is fraudulent streams taking money from the pooled money given to human artists who publish on Spotify, then this same criticism could be leveled at all AI music on Spotify, which means this is all Spotify's fault - but many AI tracks have already hit big numbers on their platform.

@WiteWulf @brucelawson

Show threadjohnny anhedonic
@alessandro @toriver @WiteWulf @brucelawson yeah this is what ai is for, this is spotify’s long term business model. the reason they are suing him is because he got on their turf
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