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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@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)
@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?
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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
I'd say he's got the rules of the system down pat.
And if it weren't such an abominable waste of ressources, it would be quite funny, I think.
But being the way it is, it is just irresponsible waste and greed. And I'm soo tired of these greedy irresponsible man-children...
So, not funny - and no pity.edit
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@basil @brucelawson oh, I didn’t know they changed to that hellish method. That’s *awful*
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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 I wouldn’t be surprised if similar things are happening on YouTube..
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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 been my single biggest "I guess I don't understand humans" moment. Internet ads being successful.
So you're going to take the word of a company that designs their own metrics and monitors everything behind closed doors. You owe them X amount of money because they reached X amount of people.
Maybe 5% of what you paid for reached customers. Less than 1% cared. 95% of it was people getting spammed trying to read the news or kids downloading minecraft mods these days.
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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 Not a metaphor, but this is the political cartoon that goes with it
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@brucelawson File under: How to make Spotify pay you for a premium subscription
@matt @brucelawson like "pay per click" in the early times of ad-business in the Internet. Of course the system was to be exploited.
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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 I hate paying the cost of what he did but I don't know in the larger perspective whether his conduct is "one guy not recycling" or "StarLink destroying the atmosphere" anymore.
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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 also : why is it a fraud.
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@brucelawson That's infuriating. Also, predictable.
And influencers are using AI to add to their stories with a musical style of their choosing and their own lyrics. Where does this leave real musicians and singers?!?
somehow this reminds me of "butchers pigs" (ceramic ornaments of pigs in a butchers uniform and apron smiling and wielding meat cleavers, which were often on display in butchers here in England)
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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 @Em0nM4stodon this specific crime is a core part of spotify's business plan
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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 Don't forget effectively stealing royalties from other artists who actually deserve them...
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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.
