After pleading guilty, a 54-year-old North Carolina man, Michael Smith, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using artificial intelligence to generate songs for a scheme that stole millions from music streaming platforms. In a press release Tuesday, the US Department of Justice announced that Smith is the first American criminally charged with AI-assisted streaming fraud.

Starting in 2017, Smith began using fake email accounts and fraudulently obtained debit cards to create thousands of fraudulent accounts on services including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music. He then employed software that pushed the bots to continuously stream songs that he claimed to own, which the DOJ said were AI-generated. By his arrest in 2024, he had created hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs, then dispersed billions of automated streams among them to avoid detection.

The vastness of his operation is staggering. According to the DOJ, in April 2023, Smith’s fake songs were fraudulently streamed 80.9 million times during that month, while Taylor Swift’s entire catalog only got 9.3 million streams during the same period. In just one month, his AI-generated songs outstreamed one of the world’s most successful artists.

The case highlights the evolving landscape of digital fraud, where traditional methods of detection may struggle to keep up with the sophistication of modern technology. As AI continues to advance, the lines between what is real and what is simulated become increasingly blurred, raising questions about the future of content authenticity in the digital age.