Man pleads guilty to generating songs with AI then having bots stream them 'billions of times' to make over $8 million in royalties

Have you ever stumbled onto an extremely popular artist that you've never heard of before, just to wonder if you're so out of touch that a global phenomenon could pass you by? Well, in at least one recent case, there was a 'musician' with billions of streams that basically all came from bots—and if that wasn't enough, the music itself was AI-generated.

The case is discussed in detail in a press release on justice.gov; the skinny is that North Carolina man Michael Smith "generated thousands...