A catalog of AI-generated songs reportedly exceeded the total number of streams of Taylor Swift's catalog on YouTube Music family subscriptions, according to the U.S. prosecutor's office. The listeners were not individuals, but bot accounts managed by a single man, Michael Smith, who has recently been sentenced to 18 months in prison. Smith pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit electronic fraud. In addition to the prison sentence, he was sentenced to two years of supervised release and the seizure of $8,091,843.64. Michael Smith, 54 years old, was convicted of participating in a scheme to "defraud streaming platforms and musicians of their royalties," according to the U.S. attorney's office. Smith pleaded guilty on March 19, 2026, to one count of conspiracy to commit electronic fraud. The fraud occurred from 2017 to 2024 and occurred in three stages. First, Smith created thousands of fake accounts, called "bot accounts," on streaming platforms such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music. Then, he used software to have these accounts stream songs that he owned, usually created using AI. Finally, he collected the royalties generated by these fake streams. He sometimes used up to 10,000 bot accounts simultaneously. These accounts had been created using fake email addresses and "debit cards obtained fraudulently," prosecutors said. To avoid being caught, Smith spread his streams across thousands of tracks. According to the prosecutors, this allowed him to avoid unusual listening patterns on a single track, which would have likely alerted the platforms. In an email, Smith explained that he needed "a TON of tracks quickly" to bypass the "anti-fraud policies" of the platforms. He used AI to create hundreds of thousands of tracks, which his bot accounts then streamed billions of times. According to the prosecutors, this earned him more than $8 million in royalties. Every time a track is streamed, the songwriter, performer, and in some cases, other rights holders are entitled to a small payment. These payments come from a shared fund and are distributed proportionally. The prosecutor compared Smith's figures to those of Taylor Swift. In April 2023, Smith's bot accounts used family subscriptions to stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times on YouTube Music. The same month, Swift's entire catalog recorded 9.3 million streams from family subscriptions, according to the press release. Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming AI as "super-intelligence." The order directed federal departments and agencies to use the terms "super-intelligence" and "SI" in their communications and official documents. It also specified that the executive branch would "no longer recognize the use of the terms 'artificial intelligence' and 'AI' in any applicable context." The recent press release uses this new term throughout the text. It refers to this case as "streaming music fraud assisted by super-intelligence." Earlier in the day, it was reported that the Department of Justice had asked its employees to use the term "super-intelligence" instead of "artificial intelligence." The internal memo specified that this instruction also applied "to documents filed with the courts, if applicable." In June 2025, non-existent groups, synthetic voices, retro-style albums fabricated from scratch... This was the emergence of the "fake bands" era, these fictional musical entities generated by AI, which proliferated on streaming platforms such as YouTube and Spotify. While some welcomed this as a new creative frontier, others saw it as a threat to real artists, musical authenticity, and the viability of the compensation system. This ease of creation raised major concerns, particularly regarding streaming fraud and lack of transparency. Experts warned of the risk of deception, where listeners could consume music without knowing that it was entirely artificial.