A 54-year-old North Carolina man has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for using artificial intelligence to defraud music streaming platforms. Michael Smith pleaded guilty in March to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. From 2017 to 2024, Smith created thousands of fake accounts and deployed bots to stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs he owned, collecting royalties fraudulently. Prosecutors say he amassed over $8 million through the scheme, using as many as 10,000 bot accounts. U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald described the operation as flooding platforms with “automated bots in the place of consumers” and “fake songs in the place of creativity.” Smith’s sentence includes a multimillion-dollar forfeiture and two years of supervised release. The Justice Department called it the first criminally charged AI-assisted streaming fraud case.