Manufacturing Legitimacy in the AI era

Michael Smith used AI to create music, and then used AI to create bots to get the “plays” and took the smartest technology companies, including Spotify and Amazon, for about $8 million. He is going to jail for his crimes. It is an early warning of how AI will disrupt the systems that power our digital society: how culture gets discovered, how commerce gets directed, and how conversations get shaped. The IFPI’s Global Music Report 2026, published March 18, called streaming fraud “theft, plain and simple.” The price tag is $2 billion a year, according to music data firm Beatdapp. Apple Music flagged and demonetized 2 billion fraudulent streams in 2025 alone. In January 2026, Deezer reported receiving over 60,000 fully AI-generated tracks daily, with 85% of streams on AI-generated music in 2025 classified as fraudulent. In 2024, automated bot traffic surpassed human traffic on the internet for the first time in a decade, with bots now accounting for 51% of all web traffic. Cloudflare blocked 13 trillion bad bot requests in 2025.