By: Wesley Zhao

With the threat of AI taking over the world increasing, already we can see changes in our lives. On June 24,2024, major record companies, like Sony, sued two digital music generation companies of using copyrighted sound recordings to generate music.

AI can be useful when people are able to take advantage of its benefits, but Udio and Suno allow users to automatically generate songs by just submitting a command, which music companies don’t like. The plaintiffs argued that the songs produced by AI were possible because the systems were trained to copy the songs that the record companies made. “The foundation of its business has been to exploit copyrighted sound recordings without permission,” said the lawsuits filed against Udio and Suno in federal court. (New York Times,2024)

Another suit said that the only reason that Udio and Suno are here is because they used outsets and needed enormous amounts of data. There is only one place where they could have gotten it from: the record companies.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to prove that the AI generating companies have engaged in copyright. But Udio denied that they used their songs. Suno’s CEO, Mike Sultan, said “Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content”(New York Times,2024)

However, music companies weren’t the only one to be sued. New York Times sued Microsoft and Open AI, saying that millions of the newspaper articles were used to train AI platforms like ChatGPT. Needless to say, AI has been helping us, but people want to take it down because of copyright issues.