John G. Koeltl

In April 2023, his bots racked up 80.9 million YouTube Music Family Plan streams, while Taylor Swift's entire catalog limped along with 9.3 million, meaning a robot choir nobody has ever heard of out-streamed the biggest pop star on Earth and pocketed more than $8 million in royalties, a feat of commercial dominance that no human has ever achieved by accident.

After pleading guilty to wire fraud conspiracy, Smith drew 18 months in prison, two years of supervised release, and an $8,091,843.64 forfeiture from Judge John G. Koeltl, plus the dubious honor of starring in the Justice Department's first ever criminally charged AI-assisted streaming fraud.

That's all the news for now.

Let's get into the DeLorean, dial in the flux capacitor, and head back to September 16th, 2025, for episode 108, Cleanup in Aisle Five.

[paper flips] Back in March, Michael Smith pleaded guilty to using AI to illegally make over $8 million in royalties by generating AI songs and streaming them with bots billions of times.

Now, Manhattan Federal Court Judge John G. Koeltl ordered Smith to serve a year and a half in jail, to be followed by two years of supervised release.

The Recording Industry Association of America said in a statement, quote, "We appreciate the court recognizing the significance of this harmful conduct and the ill-gotten gains that come from the pockets of real artists, songwriters, and their label partners." [paper flips] On Tuesday, Google opened up the SynthID detector website to everyone after granting access to a select group of journalists and researchers to test last year.

The site enables people to detect whether an image, video, or audio clip was AI-generated.

It is.

The federal judges, Judge John G. Koeltl and Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn, they ruled that in the right context, a single comment from a supervisor, like telling a female executive to lean back, is absolutely enough to legally prove a hostile work environment and discriminatory intent under these local laws.

So the court recognized that lean back wasn't just casual career advice, it was a direct negative counter to the empowerment of women in the workplace, and pushing her into stereotypically feminine design roles while ignoring her complex technical expertise.

The judges saw that for the illegal gender animus it clearly represents.