AI was supposed to free musicians from the drudgery so we could focus on creation. Instead, it’s stealing royalties from real artists, cloning their voices, and turning the tools against the people who made them necessary.
“The system has always had scams—exploited blues players on old labels come to mind—but this is industrialized, scalable, and soulless.”
We guitarists understand tools. A great amp or pedal is supposed to serve the player—amplify your voice, not replace it. The same should be true for any technology in music. Lately, though, the machines aren’t serving. They’re colonizing.
Consider two stories from the same state, North Carolina, that show how upside-down things have become.
First, Michael Smith, 54, of Cornelius. He spent years as a legitimate producer, songwriter, and label owner. Then he discovered AI could do the heavy lifting. He generated hundreds of thousands of generic tracks under fake names and used bot armies to rack up billions of fake streams. Between 2017 and 2024 he extracted roughly $8-10 million in royalties from platforms that thought those listens were real. Indicted in 2024, he pleaded guilty this March to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and must forfeit over $8 million. Algorithmic notes for phantom listeners, real money diverted from actual artists. It’s the ultimate grift on a royalty system already stretched thin.
The system has always had scams—exploited blues players on old labels come to mind—but this is industrialized, scalable, and soulless.
Then there’s Murphy Campbell, the young Appalachian folk artist who records traditional ballads on banjo and dulcimer in the woods. Her YouTube channel (@murphydoesntmatter) is pure preservation of mountain music—as honest, human, and beautiful as it gets. I’ve watched a ton of her videos, and each one is a work of art driven by amazing musicianship, and songs that are beautiful and kind of eerie. In early 2026 her voice was cloned from those very videos. AI-generated “covers” appeared on her Spotify profile. An uploader used Vydia to distribute them. Soon after, copyright claims targeted her original backyard performances, claiming the AI versions owned the sound first. Real revenue from public-domain songs temporarily blocked by the machine that stole her likeness.
Public outcry forced a rollback, but the vulnerabilities remain: easy scraping, weak protections for independent artists, and automated systems easily gamed.
Both cases reveal the same inversion. AI was pitched as liberation—free us from drudgery so we could focus on creation and higher things. Instead, it’s feeding itself. One guy uses it to manufacture fake success and siphon millions. Another artist has her identity hijacked and then turned against her. The internet and robotic tech that promised augmentation are mostly extracting and competing.
We need concrete fixes now:
- Explicit consent and fair compensation for any use of voice, performance, or likeness in AI training.
- Copyright rules that protect human creators first and prevent generated content from claiming ownership over its sources.
- Platform and distributor accountability—verify uploads, stop rewarding bot farms, and reverse trolling.
Otherwise, the new AI-driven world doesn’t just deprive us of royalties; it steals our art and deprives us of the messy humanity that makes it worth anything. Music for money alone was always a long shot, but when the system lets algorithms and bots rig the game, it hurts everyone who plays for the right reasons.
Support artists like Murphy by streaming and sharing their authentic work. Keep playing real music with your hands and heart. Demand better rules before the machines don’t just take our lunch, but take the stage entirely. The prize is still the music itself. Let’s make sure we’re the ones playing it.
AI isn’t helping—it’s hijacking. Time to push back.
