Man sentenced to prison and to repay $8million on slop royalties in first criminal bot streaming fraud case

A man has been handed a prison sentence and ordered to repay the $8million he made from slop royalties, as the first criminal bot streaming fraud case has gone to court. READ MORE: In the age of AI Oasis, there’s no point being ordinary The ruling comes following a 54-year-old man from North Carolina pleading guilty to defrauding streaming services earlier this year. He managed to get $8million worth of royalties by uploading thousands of AI-generated songs to streaming platforms, then getting bots to play the songs billions of times. In 2024 he was arrested, seven years after he started to collect royalties from the fake streams. It was also reported by the Justice Department that his AI-generated songs had over 80.9billion combined streams on YouTube Music in just one month alone. That figure is nearly 10 times higher than Taylor Swift’s stats from the same period. It has now become the first criminal bot streaming fraud case on record, and the man has been handed down a prison sentence for 18 months – charged on one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He must also serve two years of supervised release, and is required to repay just shy of $8.1million. Man Gets 18 Months in...