So corporations use ai and bots themselves in order to inflate their stats and steal money from investorsand share holders(see Reddit) and its all cool. Someone does that but it costs the corporation some money. Straight to jail.
Seriously, how has the reddit IPO which was offered to users not been a fraudulently scheme due to the website statistics being based on genuine user interaction with no mention of auto reposting or bots that are either operated by or hired by reddit?
It genuinely seems like the next ponzi scheme but that would require so many federal agencies that stopped giving shit and learning how the world works to see any peep into that business.
But what do I know, I’m just some average Joe that gets audited over a $300 mistake ony annual taxs which I have to pay a private third party more than that to do.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Using AI to provide services or crawlers to scan the internet for pages to add to search evinces is different from what this guy did with bots. Those use cases are not pretending to be a legit user in order to collect money.
What this guy did — using bots to fake listen to music — is in the same category as using bots to click on ads that you put on your own web page: it’s serving no legitimate purpose and only exists to defraud businesses which paid for the ads (or Spotify which is paying the royalties)…
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Spotify didn’t lose a dime. Their cut is fixed.
What each play is worth is determined by how many plays there were in a month, and the income from subscribers that month.
If the “pot” is ten bucks, and people listen to a hundred songs, each artist gets ten cents for each play. If there were a thousand plays, each play is only worth one cent.
This guy didn’t make money by taking it from spotify, he made it by taking it from everyone else. Spotify actually has no reason to care, and playfarming scams have been happening for years.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
How does that work though? Presumably he’s not paying subscription fees on all of his bot accounts, so they must be free accounts. I don’t use Spotify, so I don’t even know why they would have free accounts.
Unless he’s hacked other people’s accounts, then that would make sense for the seriousness of these charges.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
There are various methods.
Free tier accounts, paid accounts that rack up so many plays the pay for themselves, malware that hijacks legitimate accounts… There’s even been recommendation algorithm fuckery to manipulate the relevant tracks into getting recommended/autoplayed for a bunch of users.