I am embarrassed to read this kind of “human slop” describing the sentencing of Michael Smith, who ran an automated artificial streaming ring to the tune of $8M:

“Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans. This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud.”

My understanding is that, Executive Orders notwithstanding, “super-intelligence” as a technology simply does not exist yet (let alone absolutely did not between the time period his scheme was operational, 2017-2024), making the statements above verifiably factually inaccurate.

Was there automation? Sure seems like it, based on sources I’ve seen. This one appears to give a more complete run-down of what actually happened, without inserting any pro-American technology propaganda:

In other words, Smith’s fraudulent activities involved misrepresenting information to the streaming platforms, creating false accounts, and disguising the true nature of the streams, using bot accounts rather than human listeners, according to the indictment.

Smith used software to continuously stream songs he owned, according to the indictment. He also allegedly paid co-conspirators and people overseas to sign up for bot accounts. Smith used false names to sign up bot accounts and used debit cards in fake names to pay for the accounts, the indictment stated. […]

To avoid detection, Smith spread the artificial streams across tens of thousands of songs, where each streamed a smaller number of times to appear more credible. At its peak, Smith generated about 661,440 streams per day, resulting in annual royalties to himself exceeding $1.2 million, according to the indictment. […]

To fuel the operation, Smith collaborated with an AI music company and a music promoter to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs. The music company and promoter are not named in the indictment.

But, simply including automation – a.k.a. “software” – does not automatically make everything it touches into “super-intelligence.” Was what he did “intelligent”? That could be argued either way, but it certainly takes a lot of effort and orchestration to do what he did, at such a scale over such a long time. And in a way, this kind of fraud at its root is really just hyper-capitalism, trying to directly hack the reward mechanism without adding anything of value to society in exchange. Following through on that line of thinking, it makes a certain amount of sense to say that the market is already the “super-intelligent” paperclip maximizer people talk about as though it’s some far off possibility. We’re already enslaved to a machine which is trying to convert every resource, moment, and interaction into dollars. I don’t condone what Smith did here, of course, but it’s a logical endpoint of the games we are all forced to play all day everyday online and offline (if offline even exists anymore as a separate thing). And it is a direction which is only going to get more and more insane and exaggerated as AI ramps up…