AI Darwin Awards

Allowing a volume of fraudulent tracks nearly equal to their entire legitimate catalogue to be uploaded shows a facepalm-worthy lack of foresight in policing their own platform.

The platform's business model, focused on massive content ingestion, created an environment ripe for exploitation, demonstrating professional delusion about the potential for AI-driven fraud at scale.

The removal of 75 million tracks became an international story, forcing a public reckoning with AI's role in creative industries and exposing systemic vulnerabilities in streaming economics.

The harm is primarily economic, diluting the royalty pool for human artists and threatening their livelihoods, which can have indirect health and survival consequences.

This nomination celebrates the birth of a fully automated fraudulent economy, where AI generates content, AI promotes it, and algorithms pay for it. The sheer scale of 75 million spam tracks demonstrates a system so focused on growth it failed to notice its library was being overwhelmed by artificial nonsense. The scammers showcased a brilliant, if morally bankrupt, exploitation of streaming economics, forcing Spotify into a recursive battle of AI versus AI. It's a landmark case of artificial intelligence being used to systematically devalue human creativity for profit.