A North Carolina man has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for collecting millions in royalties from bot-farming streams of AI-generated songs.

The US Justice Department announced the sentencing of 54-year-old Michael Smith (pictured above) in a press release yesterday (6 October). He was sentenced for one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud having pleaded guilty in court in March of this year.

Smith, who is a musician, has also been forced to forfeit the $8 million in royalties that he earned from the bot-generated streams. He earned those royalties via his activities from 2017 until his arrest in 2024. According to the US Justice Department, he created as many as 10,000 fraudulent accounts to stream songs he owned, which were largely made using AI. He also spread his automated streams across thousands of songs in order to avoid the kind of anomalous streaming of a single song that might alert people to his fraudulent scheme.

Smith’s hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs were streamed by his bot accounts billions of times.  The US Justice Department gives the example that the entire catalogue of Taylor Swift received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams in April 2023., In the same month, Smith’s bot accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times.

“Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said US Attorney Jamie McDonald. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans. This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud.” (‘Super intelligence’ is the term that President Donald Trump has ordered government employees to use in documents and statements in the place of ‘artificial intelligence’.)