> The man, Michael Smith, 52, was accused in a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday of stealing royalty payments from digital streaming platforms for seven years. Mr. Smith, a flesh-and-blood musician, produced A.I.-generated music and played it billions of times using bots he had programmed, according to the indictment.<p>Fascinating. Comments in the OP (presently 18) question whether Smith’s scheme is illegal or merely an unethical exploitation of a loophole.<p>One commenter raises the point that humans are coerced into producing meaningless content only to be exploited by large corporations. Other commenters question whether streams need be listened to by humans at all.<p>What if the stream is being “listened” to by an algorithm or as training data for a neural network? What if the stream is being played to people engaged in other tasks or to pre-verbal children, to people in their sleep?<p>What qualifies a stream to be non-fraudulent?