AI-rewritten: This is a summary of an article from Ars Technica, rewritten by AI (Qwen, running locally) to make it easier to read. The facts come from the original article – read it for the full story.

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Michael Smith, a 54-year-old man from North Carolina, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to using artificial intelligence to commit streaming fraud. According to the US Department of Justice, Smith is the first American criminally charged for this specific type of AI-assisted scheme. He ran the operation for seven years starting in 2017 by creating thousands of fraudulent accounts on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. These accounts used fake email addresses and debit cards to stream songs that Smith claimed to own but were actually AI-generated.

The scale of the fraud was significant, with Smith generating hundreds of thousands of AI songs and dispersing billions of automated streams among them. In April 2023 alone, his fake songs were streamed 80.9 million times, while Taylor Swift’s entire catalog received only 9.3 million streams during the same period. The DOJ stated that this activity reduced royalties for genuine artists who share royalty pools on streaming services. As a result of the court ruling, Smith must forfeit $8,091,843.64 in stolen funds.

Smith’s legal team argued that punishing him would be an example of making one man pay for industry-wide issues and suggested he did not actually pocket the full amount. They also noted that Smith had been offered a job paying $5,000 per month to work on audio production. However, the DOJ disagreed, stating that Smith used increasingly deceptive tactics and lied to law enforcement. Officials emphasized that the sentence was necessary to deter others from committing similar streaming fraud.