By: Michael Xia
Major record companies,Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group filed a lawsuit against two companies that use artificial intelligence on monday.
The world’s biggest record companies are suing the artificial intelligence song generators Suno and Udio for copyright infringement, alleging that the AI music startups are exploiting the recorded works of artists from Chuck Berry to Mariah Carey.
Suno AI, or simply Suno, is a generative artificial intelligence music creation program designed to generate realistic songs that combine vocals and instrumentation, or are purely instrumental.
Udio is a generative artificial intelligence model that produces music based on simple text prompts. It can generate vocals and instrumentation. Its free beta version was released publicly on April 10, 2024.
The two AI companies, Suno and Udio, use text prompts to churn out original songs. Both companies have enjoyed a level of success: Suno is available for use in Microsoft Copilot through a partnership with the tech giant. Udio was used to create “BBL Drizzy,” one of the more notable examples of AI music going viral.
“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.
“Building and operating a service like Udio’s requires at the outset copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to ‘train’ a software ‘model’ to generate outputs,” one suit said. “For Udio specifically, this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings.”The suits are asking the courts to declare that the companies have engaged in copyright infringement and to assign damages.
In a statement on its website, Udio denied ,“Just as students listen to music and study scores, our model has ‘listened’ to and learned from a large collection of recorded music,” it said. “The goal of model training is to develop an understanding of musical ideas — the basic building blocks of musical expression that are owned by no one. Our system is explicitly designed to create music reflecting new musical ideas.”In an emailed statement, Suno’s chief executive, Mikey Shulman, defended his company.
And a lot of famous actresses ,singers and novelists have filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI,accusing the company of training its systems with their work.The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, saying that millions of the newspaper’s articles were used to train A.I. platforms.
The Recording Industry Association of America announced the lawsuits on Monday, brought by labels including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group Recordings and Warner Records.
One case was filed in the federal court in Boston against Suno AI, and the other in New York against Uncharted Labs, the developer of Udio AI.
The lawsuit claims Suno and Udio’s software steals music to “spit out” similar work and asked for compensation of $150,000 (£118,200, A$225,400) a work.