Michael Smith was sentenced to 18 months in prison on October 6, 2026, for using thousands of bot accounts to stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times and fraudulently collect more than $8 million in royalties, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced in a press release. U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl imposed the sentence. Smith, 54, of Cornelius, North Carolina, was also sentenced to two years of supervised release and ordered…