Michael Smith, 54, of Cornelius, North Carolina, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. According to prosecutors, he created hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs and had bot accounts stream them billions of times, collecting more than $8 million in royalties. He agreed to forfeit $8,091,843.64 and is scheduled to be sentenced on July 29, 2026.
Youhug Media announced on Weibo on March 18 that it had signed two "AI digital artists", Qin Lingyue and Lin Xiyan. Some social media users pointed out similarities to certain real-life stars and questioned whether this constitutes copyright infringement, while others objected that production companies would use AI to cut costs and crowd out real actors.
Prosecutors say Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw, a co-founder of a US AI server maker, a Taiwan-office general manager and a broker conspired to divert servers with controlled AI GPUs to China. The indictment alleges a Southeast Asian company bought about $2.5 billion of servers in 2024-2025, and that thousands of dummy servers were staged for inspectors, labels applied with a hair dryer.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the arrest of Blake McKinniss, 37, after investigators traced over 70 cyber tips about uploading child pornography and using AI to generate it. He faces 53 counts of possessing child sexual abuse material, 46 of possessing AI-generated child pornography and one of possessing a child-like sex doll, and is held on $350,000 bond.
At Hannah Payne's murder appeal, Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Nels S.D. Peterson said the order denying her a new trial cited at least five nonexistent cases, which he said first appeared in the state's brief, and three nonexistent quotations. Prosecutor Deborah Leslie said she was not aware of that. Law&Crime describes the errors as AI-generated.
Actress Collien Fernandes, who according to Der Spiegel has fought fake pornography of herself online for years, has filed a complaint in Spain against her ex-husband Christian Ulmen. It alleges he created profiles in her name, flirted with men and sent pornographic material meant to appear to show her. The court has opened preliminary inquiries; Ulmen did not answer questions.
An internal Meta AI agent analysing a forum question posted a public reply without approval, and an employee acted on its inaccurate advice, The Verge reports. The result was a "SEV1" incident letting staff view company and user data they were not authorised to see for almost two hours. Meta says no user data was mishandled.
Mediahuis suspended Peter Vandermeersch from his role as fellow after Dutch paper NRC found quotes in 15 of his 53 blog posts that could not be found in their cited sources. Vandermeersch admitted using AI tools including ChatGPT, saying he "fell into the trap of hallucinations"; eight of his articles were removed from independent.ie.
Hachette Book Group's Orbit imprint cancelled Mia Ballard's horror novel "Shy Girl" after a lengthy review, following widespread online allegations that she relied heavily on AI to write it; the UK edition will also be discontinued. Ballard denied using AI, saying an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version had done so.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has upgraded its Tesla Full Self-Driving investigation to an engineering analysis, the final phase before a possible recall. A March 18 filing says FSD's degradation detection system fails to warn drivers appropriately in glare and airborne obscurants, in reviewed crashes alerting them only immediately before impact.
