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.
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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?
@brucelawson
Easter Island comes to mind, but this is just faster and a bigger scale.Cutting down forests to create more and more effigies eventually doomed the culture, but it took centuries and only killed off that one settlement. Generating artificial songs by the million to be paid for because a million robots watched, is just a less durable and faster way of social suicide.
On the plus side, some future anthropologist will write her PhD on this
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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?
@brucelawson Yes. Any metaphor is a better metaphor than reality. You can't have a thing and then point at it and call it a metaphor for the thing that it is, silly.
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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?
@brucelawson A perfect self-licking ice cream cone!
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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?
@brucelawson a lot of the world right now is people going "i'll bet there's not a law against this, let me see if i can get rich off it" and either being proven right or wrong
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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?
@brucelawson We get the results we deserve. We set up the incentives. Results follow directly from the incentives.
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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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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.
@alessandro @WiteWulf @brucelawson The court, obviously, disagreed with your whitewashing of the fraud.
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@alessandro @WiteWulf @brucelawson The court, obviously, disagreed with your whitewashing of the fraud.
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.
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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?
and there it is: a circular economy just trawling (trolling) endlessly for profits.
The information highway is jammed with empty cars, impassable.
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@alessandro @WiteWulf @brucelawson The court, obviously, disagreed with your whitewashing of the fraud.
@toriver @alessandro @WiteWulf @brucelawson I like how you start by assuming that it's fraud, and then attack the person who you are responding to for going against your assumption!
care to support your assertion that it is fraud? it certainly MIGHT be! but you're definitely wrong about what "the court" said - he pled guilty, there was no court ruling in this case.
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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?
@brucelawson It's all non-sense.
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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?
@brucelawson
If he specifically got that money from Spotify, I'm all in. -
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?
@brucelawson Why is this seen as a crime?
Isn't this case the whole point to using AI?
Why has the court ignored the possibility that the AI bots, which we are repeatedly told are "sentient" and have "intelligence" actually enjoyed listening to the music?
Why are the rights of AI bots being trampled on in this way without giving them a chance to present their side of the story as potential victims in a case?
/i
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@toriver @alessandro @WiteWulf @brucelawson I like how you start by assuming that it's fraud, and then attack the person who you are responding to for going against your assumption!
care to support your assertion that it is fraud? it certainly MIGHT be! but you're definitely wrong about what "the court" said - he pled guilty, there was no court ruling in this case.
@Amoshias @toriver @alessandro @brucelawson the justice.gov website literally calls it “music streaming fraud”. There was no assumption made.
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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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@Amoshias @toriver @alessandro @brucelawson the justice.gov website literally calls it “music streaming fraud”. There was no assumption made.
Yeah, I'm not adamant that it wasn't fraud, but I wonder how listener bots are fraudulent (assuming "fraud" here is taking money from the royalties pool) but AI music isn't - especially when AI music is not labeled as such and pretends to be a real artist. The only difference I can see is that the latter doesn't harm Spotify - only human artists, so Spotify DGAF.
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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?
i dont think spotify suffered any damages
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@brucelawson Why is this seen as a crime?
Isn't this case the whole point to using AI?
Why has the court ignored the possibility that the AI bots, which we are repeatedly told are "sentient" and have "intelligence" actually enjoyed listening to the music?
Why are the rights of AI bots being trampled on in this way without giving them a chance to present their side of the story as potential victims in a case?
/i
yes, yes. the robots benefited
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@brucelawson Don't forget effectively stealing royalties from other artists who actually deserve them...
@jzb @brucelawson How companies such as Spotity choose to pay out "royalties", which algorithms they use are at best opaque.
In a recent article in Klassekampen a Spotify user who has had a paid subscription for 16 years discovered that his favourite artists had benefited to the tune of 262 Norwegian Crowns (around EUR 23) IN TOTAL during that 16 year period.
Paywall article
Avslører hva artister tjener på din lytting
Hans Martin Austestad har vært Spotify-abonnent i 16 år. Likevel har han ikke generert mer enn 262 kroner til favorittartistene sine.
(klassekampen.no)
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@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?
@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.
