US man pleads guilty to defrauding music streamers out of millions using AI
A North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to defrauding music streaming platforms and his fellow musicians out of millions in royalties by flooding the services with thousands of AI-generated songs – and using automated “bots” to artificially boost the number of listens into the billions.As part of a deal with federal prosecutors in New York’s southern district, 52-year-old Michael Smith pleaded guilty on Friday to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.The case against the Cornelius, North Carolina, resident is one of the first successful prosecutions of AI-related fraud in the music business, which is being hammered by fake music that threatens to swamp streaming services and deprive earnings from human musicians and copyright holders.“Michael Smith generated thousands of fake songs using artificial intelligence and then streamed those fake songs billions of times,” US attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement.“Although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole was real.
Millions of dollars in royalties that Smith diverted from real, deserving artists and rights holders.Smith’s brazen scheme is over, as he stands convicted of a federal crime for his AI-assisted fraud.”Smith was charged in September 2024 with fraudulently obtaining more than $10m in royalty payments by amassing as many as 661,440 streams daily between 2017 and 2024, yielding annual royalties of $1,027,128.Then US attorney Damian Williams said the defendant had stolen “millions in royalties that should have been paid to musicians, songwriters, and other rights holders whose songs were legitimately streamed” and it was “time for Smith to face the music”.As one X commentator by the handle of Tuki pointed out after the plea deal was announced, Smith had used “AI make the music AND the audience” and had made $1.
2m a year “for music no human ever actually listened to”.Musicians and the music industry, the X user added, now has “to fight songs that don’t exist being listened to by people who don’t exist”.Under the terms of his plea agreement, Smith now faces up to five years in prison and the forfeiture of $8,091,843.64 when he is sentenced in July.The case against Smith highlights a growing problem for the music industry that had largely recovered from the Napster music piracy era of the early 2000s only to be faced with an AI-based threat to revenue from music streaming platforms such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube Music.
Under their business model, which musicians have long complained results in subsistence earnings except for a few big stars, they are recompensed from a pool of funds proportionate to their streams.But AI-generated music – and AI-related schemes to boost plays – diverts funds from musicians and songwriters whose songs were legitimately streamed by real consumers.The UK government recently abandoned plans to allow AI companies to use copyrighted works without permission, a proposal strongly opposed by thousands of artists, including Elton John, Dua Lipa and Paul McCartney.The issue of generative AI music has placed a spotlight on Suno, a company with 2 million subscribers that allows users to turn out AI-generated music that is disrupting the act of creation.The French streaming service Deezer suggests that 97% of people cannot differentiate between human-generated music and that made by AI – including the now 60,000 fully AI-generated tracks delivered to the service daily.
According to the US trade publication Billboard, Suno generates 7m songs a day, which equates to a streamer’s entire catalog of music every two weeks.Much of the output is passably similar to existing, human-composed music but like most AI production reads as mass-produced without artistic risk or depth.Suno’s chief executive, Paul Sinclair, told Billboard earlier in March that he was conflicted.“Truly, every single day I’m conflicted,” he is quoted as saying.“This s–t is complicated … I want to make sure there’s whole future generations of the beauty of art and music and the ability to build careers around it.
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Starmer adviser urges ministers to look at profits cap for energy and petrol firms
The government’s top cost of living adviser has called on ministers to explore a temporary cap on the profits of energy and petrol companies to prevent them from cashing in excessively on the war in the Middle East.Richard Walker – a Labour peer, the chair of Iceland supermarkets and the prime minister’s “cost of living champion” – said he had asked the government to examine limiting how much businesses were able to benefit from higher energy prices after Iran’s blockade of the strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping route for Europe’s oil and gas, and the wider conflict in the region.“I have asked the government to consider a temporary profit cap … to stop producers and retailers exploiting the crisis to make windfall profits at the expense of consumers,” Walker wrote in a column in the Sunday Times.“As executive chairman of a retailer, I have no problem with profit. It’s what allows businesses to invest, employ people and pay tax
Thousands of care leavers in England ‘locked out’ of work as firms slow to adapt
Thousands of young people leaving care in England are being left “locked out” of work by employers who say they are open to hiring but make few changes to adapt, a charity has warned.Calling on employers to act on their promises, the Drive Forward Foundation said care leavers were almost three times more likely to be out of work than their peers.As ministers push to tackle a youth jobs crisis, the charity, which helps care leavers to find work, said this employment gap had remained “stubbornly consistent” despite a decade of youth jobs initiatives.Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that 40% of care-experienced people aged 19 to 21 are not in employment, education or training (Neet), compared with 12.7% of their non-care-experienced peers
Palantir extends reach into British state as it gets access to sensitive FCA data
Palantir is to be granted access to a trove of highly sensitive UK financial regulation data, in a deal that has prompted fresh concerns about the US AI company’s deepening reach into the British state, the Guardian can reveal.The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has awarded Palantir a contract to investigate the watchdog’s internal intelligence data in an effort to help it tackle financial crime, which includes investigating fraud, money laundering and insider trading.The Miami-based company, co-founded by the billionaire Donald Trump donor Peter Thiel, has been appointed for a three-month trial, paying more than £30,000 a week to analyse the FCA’s vast “data lake”, which could lead to a full procurement of an AI system.The deal is part of the FCA’s drive to use digital intelligence to better focus resources on rule-breaking among the 42,000 financial services firms it regulates, from major banks to crypto exchanges.There was only one other, unnamed competitor for the contract
‘Thank God they’re still alive’: Kaiser therapists claim its new screening system puts patients at higher risk by delaying their care
Ilana Marcucci-Morris is worried about the patients she treats and how long it took for them to arrive in her office. At Kaiser Permanente’s psychiatry outpatient clinic in Oakland, California, she says she increasingly finds herself assessing people experiencing more severe mental health issues than two years ago. For those who do make it to their appointments, she thinks: “Thank God they’re still alive.”It wasn’t always this way, according to Marcucci-Morris, a licensed clinical social worker. Licensed professionals used to almost always be the first point of contact for patients with behavioral health issues at Kaiser, she said
GB strike golden treble at world indoors with Hodgkinson, Hunter Bell and Caudery
Amid a gold rush for the ages, one image became instantly seared on the mind: Georgia Hunter Bell, Molly Caudery and Keely Hodgkinson jumping in pure delirium, before screaming in delight as they revelled in surely the greatest night for British athletics since the London 2012 Olympics.You could hear them high in the stands in Torun. And, one hopes, even louder in homes up and down the land. For across 29 enthralling minutes they delivered echoes of Super Saturday with three brilliant world indoor championship gold medals one after another. Bang
Chessum makes Tigers purr on return from England duty as Bristol fall short
Swapping the bright Saturday night lights of the Stade de France for the rusty old Crumbie Stand can be a real mental challenge. There is certainly less demand for foie gras in Aylestone but for certain people nothing beats a constant diet of rugby. England’s Ollie Chessum did occasionally look a tad weary during another selfless 80-minute shift but a vital 33-19 Leicester win made all those hard yards worthwhile.The result not only hoists the Tigers into third place in the Prem table but Gabriel Hamer-Webb’s spectacular last-gasp try earned what could prove a key extra point when the playoff maths are totted up. Bristol, who had been pressing for a couple of bonus points of their own, were ultimately left empty-handed and down in fifth place after a game that was never less than intense and absorbing
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