that’s fair, my absolute statement doesn’t reflect the exclusive way anti fraud laws are written. you certainly might find and successfully exploit legal ways to lie for financial gain, but at best it’s unethical and at worst you’ll have to defend why your deceit isn’t criminal fraud in a lawsuit. it kind of depends on who you piss off the most, imo.
uh, yes? it’s at the least fraud fs? the article says the doj is charging mike smith with three money laundering charges and one count of wire fraud. obviously the wire fraud charge comes from an argument that smith defrauded the distribution companies into illegitimately paying out royalties for false streams. note that the artificial intelligence solution only comes into the argument for the purposes of how he committed the crime, it really had nothing to do with the crime itself, at least intrinsically. if you read the press release from the doj, you can see that they make a pretty airtight argument that, quote:
SMITH made numerous misrepresentations to the Streaming Platforms in furtherance of the fraud scheme. For example, SMITH repeatedly lied to the Streaming Platforms when he used false names and other information to create the Bot Accounts and when he agreed to abide by terms and conditions that prohibited streaming manipulation. SMITH also deceived the Streaming Platforms by making it appear as if legitimate users were in control of the Bot Accounts and streaming music when, in fact, the Bot Accounts were hard coded to stream SMITH’s music billions of times. SMITH also caused the Streaming Platforms to falsely report billions of streams of his music, even though SMITH knew that those streams were in fact caused by the Bot Accounts rather than real human listeners.
SMITH’s hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs were streamed by his Bot Accounts billions of times, which allowed him to fraudulently obtain more than $10 million in royalties.
it is not illegal to lie. it is absolutely illegal to lie for the purposes of financial gain. sure, i’m not disagreeing that what he did could not somehow be construed as something of a robin hood character arc (even tho he most certainly did this for the purposes of his own personal enrichment). but he almost definitely is guilty of the wire fraud charge and i do have a strong feeling, based on the prosecutorial level of this case, the involvement of a specialized division of the fbi, and his purported co-conspirators; that the money laundering charges are ironclad as well. frankly, i’m hoping his co-conspirators actually do end up going to trial and we get to learn what the company that aided in his fraud actually was. on fucking god it’d be one thing if he ran this grift machine for a little while, paid off a lil bit of his debts and all, maybe even lived off of it. but to steal $10 million fucking dollars with it, even when he knew he was committing fraud and had to explicitly hide his criminal activity??? no shit the fbi was hot on your trail. what an absolutely, colossal dipshit michael smith must be. i respect the ingenuity but it is so blindingly obvious that 10 million dollars was egregiously too many times to press a “free money button” you just invented in a capitalist autocratic hellscape.
QUICK EDIT: i do just wanna say also i did not downvote u/shani66 and i just wanted to contribute to discussion. just noticed after i posted someone had downvoted them which is kinda goofy of whoever that is.
that’s a monistic point of view. you clearly have never lived in or near a food desert, or somewhere where fast food is the only option, because oftentimes at a local scale restaurants do buy up all available food resources. sure. these people could subsist off of wild fucking berries outside instead. why not. the choices of large restaurant megacorps weigh heavy on millions.
restaurants provide a service the same way landlords do. just bc you privatized an essential commodity does not immediately make your privatized entity a useful or essential service, and i detest the notion that it does. it’s circular logic.
EDIT: i’m getting downvoted but idc. i still think im right. weep all you want, but at its core, the buying and selling of goods/services represents an ethical dilemma at best and an atrocity at worst. the argument that restaurants are entirely a choice to go to is both overly broad and a straw man. restaurants often do impact people’s budgets and lifestyles, believe it or not. you can’t just blanket say they have no culpability in this arena because reasons. it is the mechanisms of the market and economy themselves that oppress us. it is not inherently human. it is not the only way to organize ourselves. we can do better, and we deserve better. who the fuck cares how much “value” literally anything has? i’ll trade you five smogels for a smilji. yay, everyone magically gained bc of the incantation! grow the fuck up. outdated ideas have no place in modern, civilized society. any imagined net benefits of money you can come up with are a drop in the bucket compared to its power as a stupid fucking thoughtworm
that still isn’t an explanation of how the server supposedly “does not have the means to decrypt them [the messages]”, which isn’t me saying it’s impossible. i’m well aware of possible cryptographic solutions here. but, it isn’t wrong to be sus of this application until the organization/developers have demonstrated a degree of trustworthiness. i honestly don’t see why you would use this over just encrypting and transfering the data yourself using more traditional methods that involve the minimum number of parties. i might just be ignorant of this project, but i’m weary of it until i have a chance for further investigation