Arcadia Publishing built its empire on small-town storytellers. Now it wants to sell their words to an A.I. company no one will name. Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. You're already subscribed to the aa_Nitish_Pahwa newsletter. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

Kaufman made a playlist of all the tracks he could find and gave it a derogatory name. "It's more fun to laugh about it than to feel bad about it," he says. "But it is disconcerting that this can happen." And it was strange to him, as a musician and producer who generally goes "under the radar", to be targeted. "Why not go for someone big?" he asks.

There is a battle gripping the music business today around the manipulation of streaming services – and innocent indie artists are the collateral damage. Fraudsters are flooding Spotify, Apple Music and the rest with AI-generated tracks, to try and hoover up the royalties generated by people listening to them. These tracks are cheap, quick and easy to make, with Deezer estimating in April that over 20,000 fully AI-created tracks – that's 18% of new tracks – were being ingested into its platform daily, almost double the number in January. The fraudsters often then use bots, AI or humans to endlessly listen to these fake songs and generate revenue, while others are exploiting upload services to get fake songs put on real artists' pages and siphon off royalties that way. Spotify fines the worst offenders and says it puts "significant engineering resources and research into detecting, mitigating, and removing artificial streaming activity", while Apple Music claims "less than 1% of all streams are manipulated" on its service.

Autonomous agents represent an inevitable evolution of the internet. Current agent frameworks do not embed a standard protocol for agent-to-agent interaction, leaving existing agents isolated from their peers. As intellectual property is the native asset ingested by and produced by agents, a true agent economy requires equipping agents with a universal framework for engaging in binding contracts with each other, including the exchange of valuable training data, personality, and other forms of Intellectual Property. A purely agent-to-agent transaction layer would transcend the need for human intermediation in multi-agent interactions. The Agent Transaction Control Protocol for Intellectual Property (ATCP/IP) introduces a trustless framework for exchanging IP between agents via programmable contracts, enabling agents to initiate, trade, borrow, and sell agent-to-agent contracts on the Story blockchain network. These contracts not only represent auditable onchain execution but also contain a legal wrapper that allows agents to express and enforce their actions in the offchain legal setting, creating legal personhood for agents. Via ATCP/IP, agents can autonomously sell their training data to other agents, license confidential or proprietary information, collaborate on content based on their unique skills, all of which constitutes an emergent knowledge economy.

A musician in the US has been accused of using artificial intelligence (AI) tools and thousands of bots to fraudulently stream songs billions of times in order to claim millions of dollars of royalties. Michael Smith, of North Carolina, has been charged with three counts of wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy charges. Prosecutors say it is the first criminal case of its kind they have handled. "Through his brazen fraud scheme, Smith stole millions in royalties that should have been paid to musicians, songwriters, and other rights holders whose songs were legitimately streamed," said US attorney Damian Williams. According to an unsealed indictment detailing the charges, the 52-year-old used hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs to manipulate streams.

A North Carolina man is facing fraud charges after allegedly uploading hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs to streaming services and using bots to play them billions of times. Michael Smith is said to have received over 10 million in royalties since 2017 via the scheme. Smith, 52, was arrested on Wednesday. An indictment [PDF] that was unsealed the same day accuses him of using the bots to steal royalty payments from platforms including Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. Smith has been charged with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy.

Spotify has reportedly pulled tens of thousands of tracks from generative AI company Boomy. It's said to have removed seven percent of the songs created by the startup's systems, which underscores the swift proliferation of AI-generated content on music streaming platforms. Universal Music reportedly told Spotify and other major services that it detected suspicious streaming activity on Boomy's songs. In other words, there were suspicions that bots were being used to boost listener figures and generate ill-gotten revenue for uploaders. Spotify pays royalties to artists and rights holders on a per-listen basis.

Grimes has welcomed musicians to create new songs with her voice using Artificial Intelligence, saying she would split 50% of royalties on any successful AI-generated track that included her voice. The Canadian singer, whose real name is Claire Boucher, tweeted that it was the "same deal as I would with any artist I collab[orate] with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty," she tweeted. I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Feel free to use my voice without penalty.

Duke law and philosophy professor and author Nita Farahany says the challenge for humans with quickly developing artificial intelligence is the ethical and legal constraints around it. As controversy swirls around the use of famous artists' vocals for AI-generated music, Grimes seems to be embracing the use of artificial intelligence in the music industry. In a tweet Sunday, the 33-year-old Canadian singer, whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher, said she is happy to have her voice featured on AI-simulated music tracks as long as she is compensated with royalties for successful songs. "I'll split 50 [percent] royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice," Grimes, who shares two children with Elon Musk, tweeted. Feel free to use my voice without penalty.

Michael Huppe is President & CEO of SoundExchange, an adjunct music law professor, published author, frequent contributor and lecturer. In the not-too-distance future, when a new recording artist seizes the spotlight with hit songs, a huge social media following and sold-out venues, it won't be a human being. It'll be a performer whose lyrics, melodies and voice are solely created by artificial intelligence (AI). We're already seeing hints of this with virtual artists such as metaverse avatars, hybrid performers that rely on a combination of AI and human talent. Beyond music, there's also been the emergence of AI products that create realistic digital images based on a natural language sentence provided by the user.