If a song is created by artificial intelligence and listened to by a bot, was it even heard at all? It's a problem music-streaming companies now face as generative AI is rapidly making it easier for anyone to churn out songs with a few clicks, and then send bots to stream them for cash. "It's a floodgate," says Tony Rigg, a lecturer in music industry management at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. And that torrent of new music amplifies the issue of fake listening, giving people a simple way to get streams on low-quality tracks. Some turn to third-party companies promising to boost streams, which then enlist bot-made accounts to listen to the same playlists on repeat.