Meanwhile, in the land of Fox News, Plantation Owner Christianity, RFK Jr and Donald Trump, a man uses AI machines trained on other people’s music, to create a band that doesn’t exist, generate thousands of mock music tracks from that mock band, put them on a streaming service that pays real bands next to nothing for their music, and then builds an army of bots to stream his mock band’s mock music and get millions in royalties from all his mock listeners.

North Carolina Musician Charged With Music Streaming Fraud Aided By Artificial Intelligence

FBI Acting Assistant Director Christie M. Curtis said: “Michael Smith allegedly produced hundreds of thousands of songs with artificial intelligence and utilized automatic features to repeatedly stream the music to generate unlawful royalties to the tune of $10 million.

SMITH created thousands of accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. He then used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream songs that he owned. At a certain point in the charged time period, SMITH estimated that he could use the Bot Accounts to generate approximately 661,440 streams per day, yielding annual royalties of $1,207,128.

SMITH spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song. SMITH was aware that if, for example, a single song was streamed one billion times, it would raise suspicions at the Streaming Platforms and the music distribution companies that those streams were the result of streaming manipulation. A billion fake streams spread across tens of thousands of songs, however, would be more difficult to detect, because each song would only be streamed a much smaller number of times. As a result, SMITH repeatedly identified the need for more songs as crucial for facilitating the fraud scheme. For example, on or about December 26, 2018, SMITH emailed two co conspirators that, “We need to get a TON of songs fast to make this work around the anti-fraud policies these guys are all using now.”

If only they’d paid his royalties in mock money, say three dollar bills or one of Trump’s bitcoin things, it would have been the perfect mock crime.

Now I need a mocktail…