A man in the United States uses AI to create songs, defrauding royalties of over $8 million BlockBeats News: On March 20th, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced today that Michael Smith, a resident of Cornelius, North Carolina, has officially pleaded guilty to his involvement in a streaming royalty fraud case. According to the lawsuit documents and court statements, Michael Smith used AI to generate hundreds of thousands of songs in bulk, and used an automated program called "robot account" to perform billions of false plays on the aforementioned songs to simulate the listening behavior of real users. The involved streaming platforms include mainstream platforms such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music. Due to the distribution of royalties from various platforms to rights holders in proportion to the playback ratio from the public royalty pool, large-scale fake traffic transfers the royalty income that legitimate creators deserve to fraudsters. To avoid abnormal traffic detection on the platform, Smith dispersed the robot's playback volume to thousands of songs, deliberately lowering the peak single playback. Through the above means, it has accumulated more than 8.09 million US dollars in stolen royalties. Smith has pleaded guilty in court to the charge of "conspiring to commit telecommunications fraud" and agreed to pay the outstanding amount of $8091843.64. The maximum sentence for this charge is five years in prison, and the official verdict will be announced on July 29, 2026.