@therealoshow: Michael Smith has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after using bots to stream his own AI-generated songs, pulling millions of dollars from royalty payments meant for real artists and songwriters. At one point, his catalog showed more monthly listeners than Taylor Swift in YouTube Music’s family-plan category. By spreading fake plays across hundreds of thousands of tracks, he tried to keep the operation from raising alarms. Those fraudulent streams took a share of the royalty pool away from legitimate musicians. Creating AI music wasn’t the crime. Faking the audience to collect royalties was.

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Sunday 18 October 2026 14:05:56 GMT