By Robyn Seltzer
Staff Writer
Michael Smith was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using artificial intelligence to generate hundreds of thousands of songs to make him millions on Oct. 6.
The Manhattan Federal Court ordered Smith to forfeit over $8 million in addition to the time he is to spend in jail. After his sentence, the North Carolina resident is to spend two years under court supervision. He was originally indicted on charges of wired fraud and money laundering in Sept. 2024, and in March 2026, Smith pleaded guilty to his charges.
Before Smith was caught, it was reported that he produced hundreds of thousands of fake songs from 2017 to 2024, and the evolution of AI only made the operation easier. With AI on his hands, he was able to more easily generate realistic and non-suspecting songs at a more efficient rate than earlier in his scheme. He ran as many as 10,000 bot accounts that were responsible for streaming the songs and bringing in what is estimated to be over $14 million total over seven years.
To make as much money as possible without getting caught, Smith ensured that each bot was only streaming each song a few times a day. Streaming the songs in small quantities did not raise suspicion to streaming services, and explains why Smith was able to get away with this for so long.
To put into perspective just how many streams Smith was gathering, it was cited that in April 2023, Taylor Swift collected 9.3 million streams from her discography on YouTube Music through family plans. That same month, Smith's bot accounts streamed his AI music 80.9 million times, making the "Patient Zero" singer seem like a small artist in comparison.
While there is much to be discussed on whether Smith's use of AI is ethical and should be treated as its own issue, the subject of the case surrounded the money that he essentially stole from other artists on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Smith's lawyers, however, compared his money laundering to each fraudulent stream being a "drop in the ocean," as each song was only being streamed a few times. Prosecutors revealed that this does not deter from the fact that Smith still brought in millions of dollars that the streaming services could have been providing to real artists.
As this is the first federal court case dealing with music streaming fraud, it was difficult for attorneys to decide exactly which direction to go in with establishing the severity of Smith's case.
Although this was the first case involving money laundering with fraudulent streams, the growth of AI and technology as a whole will undoubtedly produce more cases like this one, where those involved will have to decide how the future of AI-related cases may shape future generations of court cases and laws.
