Every technological advance creates opportunities for the far-sighted, creative and clever to achieve great things, or, at very least, make great profits. Artificial Intelligence is one of the most significant technological advances we have experienced in quite a while, and the good, the bad and the ethically ugly are just beginning to see all of its possibilities. Michael Smith, 52, seems to have been ahead of most of them. He is in the last category.

The enterprising con man [time for “allegedly” here] used artificial intelligence to create hundreds of thousands of fake songs, attached them to imaginary bands, then put them on streaming services where he had them downloaded by non-existent listeners. This resulted in a very real haul of about $10 million, according to a federal indictment that was unsealed this week.

Smith, who is a trained musician and who knows a bit about computers too, used A.I. to create music and assigned it to computer-generated artists with names redolent of the sillier band names in the Sixties, notably “Strawberry Alarm Clock”: “Callous Post,” “Calorie Screams,” “Calvinistic Dust.” The songs had equally nonsensical titles, like “Zygotic Washstands,” “Zymotechnical” and “Zygophyllum.”

To be fair, there are real bands out there named Dirty Projectors, Neutral Milk Hotel and “Sunn 0)))” as well as genuine songs with titles like like “MMMBop.” This helped Smith’s computer-generated artist and titles blend in and avoid detection.

First, Smith created thousands of fake streaming accounts using email addresses he purchased online. Next he then created software to stream his music on loops from different computers, so it seemed as if individual listeners were downloading the songs from different places. In 2017, Smith wrote a a business plan in which he calculated that he could stream songs 661,440 times each day, bringing in royalty payments of $3,307.20 every day with an annual profit he estimated at $1.2 million in a year. By creating sufficient numbers of fake songs, no single tune would be streamed so many times that it would attract attention.

In 2018 the scheme was launched. Using the AI bots as his composers, Smith created a massive catalog of songs uploading uploading thousands of new compositions to streaming platforms each week. In a 2019 email to an A.I. executive, he called this “instant music.” Good name! The instant music earned the clever bot-assisted composer $110,000 each month. This year, he estimated in another email that his “songs” had reached 4 billion streams generating $12 million in royalties.

Smith was arrested this week and was charged with running a wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. This does not guarantee a conviction by any means, because the law is always behind technological leaps that change the landscape for industrious crooks. Smith might have found a loophole in the law as well as in the streaming business. We shall see. Federal prosecutors have been on a losing streak lately.

How many other Michael Smiths are out there now, either getting rich using AI accomplices or plotting to do so?

My guess: a lot.

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Source: New York Times