By: Hunter Ding
On June 24, 2024, major record companies including Sony, Universal, and Warner corporations, sued two A.I. music generation companies, Udio and Suno, accusing them of utilizing copyrighted sounds and songs to train their A.I.s.
The two aforementioned AI companies allow users to create songs almost immediately by submitting a text prompt, similar to A.I. image and art generators like Midjourney. A.I. is upending numerous industries to some extent and benefiting others as well. Among those under threat of being upended is the music industry. Plaintiffs Sony, Universal, and Warner argued in their lawsuits that the songs produced by the A.I. companies were only possible because their systems were trained on intellectual property owned by the plaintiffs.
The suits are asking federal courts in Massachusetts and New York to find that the companies have engaged in copyright infringement and to assign damages. “These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale,” commented Ken Doroshow, the chief legal officer of the Recording Industry Association of America. “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.”
In a statement on its website, Udio (also known as Uncharted Labs) denied that its A.I. training methods were inappropriate: “Just as students listen to music and study scores, our model has ‘listened’ to and learned from a large collection of recorded music. 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. ”
Suno’s chief executive similarly defended his company: “Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content.” Even in the eve of a lawsuit, Suno released an iOS app to promote its services.
These lawsuits big for AI and those with concerns about its future. An industry under threat of being replaced entirely by AI is fighting back in a way, and if either side wins, there could be major effects resonating through the AI industry and every industry threatened by AI.