With the Pokemon cards you are vaguely harming a nebulous population of other people who wanted to buy the cards from Walmart but won't get the opportunity. Walmart still earns the revenue, so it's hard to explain that you are "stealing" anything of value.
With fake bot streams it is pretty clearly stealing from the other artists who would otherwise get a greater share of the royalties pool. I see your point, but I really have to stretch my imagination to call them morally equivalent.
In terms of choosing the con, the guy calls himself a musician so he probably just fell into it. I bet there was a slippery slope effect: use bots "just a bit" at first to juice the algorithm for his own real songs. Then dabbling with AI generation to tweak the algorithm more, oh the royalty payments feel good, maybe a few more bots...
With fake bot streams it is pretty clearly stealing from the other artists who would otherwise get a greater share of the royalties pool. I see your point, but I really have to stretch my imagination to call them morally equivalent.
In terms of choosing the con, the guy calls himself a musician so he probably just fell into it. I bet there was a slippery slope effect: use bots "just a bit" at first to juice the algorithm for his own real songs. Then dabbling with AI generation to tweak the algorithm more, oh the royalty payments feel good, maybe a few more bots...