If revenue was not pooled across subscribers you wouldn’t have any incentive for fraud in the system. If instead of taking all (royalty related) revenue, and dividing it by all streams from all artists, you divided the portion of the subscription for royalties from each subscriber across the set of songs THEY streamed, a bot playing 10 million streams in a month from their account of one artist would pay one subscriptions worth of royalties to that artist, vs a measurable percentage of all subscriber revenue. And if you subscribe to the service, and just listened to one band, that band would get the full royalties from your account.

If a bot wants to pay $10 to get $2 to an artist, go ahead, but other fan money is unaffected. This is 100% technically feasible, but would tend to make many mid level successful artists, vs a few mega stars, so will probably never happen. So weird how aligned incentives == aligned outcomes.

Interesting issue with Turing tests: what are the ramifications if a machine passes the test for a specific human judge? And if the "testing" is not a formal evaluation period by a skeptical mind, but an ongoing conversation where the user starts with alternate goals (task management, coding, organization, etc)? And if the "AI" involved is completely amoral and interested only in "pleasing" the person in a way that generates more prompts in the future?

I am very concerned about the outcomes in the article, but even more concerned that this is probably the tip of the iceberg, as companies further iterate on LLMs and usage continues to increase.

Not really a mystery. Click the article link, and watch the video. The Army hospital is clearly visible in the background, and one way street exiting the hospital with no entry lane (just a bike lane). So they all turn on the one block long road (15 ave) get to the one way (wrong way) street) in front of the hospital and then turn around and go back.

The video makes it pretty clear what is going on. Street view on google maps also clearly shows the one way street going the wrong way and the bike lane at the border of the houses and the hospital street.

So nothing dodgy at all.