By: Kingsley Wong

Large platform gaming and music companies like Sony, Universal, etc, are suing the digital AI music generating companies Udio, and Suno. They state that Udio and Suno are “employing music and sounds protected by copyright to teach the AI that runs their companies.”

Similar to how A.I. services like Midjourney generate photos in response to text commands, the two firms in the lawsuit—Udio and Suno—enable users to compose songs virtually rapidly by sending in a text command. For example, if you typed in romance and flowers, the website would generate song lyrics about romance and flowers.

Many modern companies like Amazon are depending on AI to support their industry. If they can effectively use AI to their advantage, Amazon can gain money from it. If they don’t use it correctly and efficiently, they can do something that offends other companies in a way, such as in this case, copyrighting music that they rightly own. However, the plaintiffs from the music industry contended in their claims that the only reason these A.I. corporations could make songs is because their systems were trained on mountains of the music studios’ intellectual property.

The lawsuits brought against Udio and Suno in federal court stated that “the foundation of its business has been to exploit copyrighted sound recordings without permission.”

One lawsuit said, “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.” The lawsuit also stated, “For Udio specifically, this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings.”

The lawsuits seek damages from the courts as well as a declaration that the firms violated copyright.

According to a statement by RIAA’s chief legal officer, Ken Doroshow, “These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale.” He also stated, “These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical, and lawful development of generative A.I. systems,” Doroshow continued from his earlier remark.

In a statement posted on their website, Udio refuted claims that its software training techniques were improper. “Our model has ‘listened’ to and learned from a large collection of recorded music, just as students listen to music and study scores.” The statement also states, “Developing a grasp of musical concepts, the fundamental, publicly owned building blocks of musical expression, is the aim of model instruction. Our method is specifically made to produce music that expresses novel musical concepts”.

Mikey Shulman, the CEO of Suno, defended the company in an email. “Our technology is revolutionary; it is made to produce entirely new outputs, not to learn and repeat pre-existing content,” Shulman stated. Users are unable to specify particular artists when requesting that Suno’s software produce a certain piece of work.

According to Shulman, “Suno is built for new music, new uses, and new musicians.” Shulman also claimed that “Innovation is highly valued by us.”

Utilizing technology in the present era can be quite dangerous. These are risks that many take, and they can either be profitable or detrimental. In any case, a sizable portion of people’s life involves technology. AI can be dangerous if you don’t handle it correctly, in situations such as copyrighting owned music. Regardless of technological use, it nevertheless has a global impact on a large number of individuals.