Are A.I. Music Generators Using Copyrighted Music To Train Their Products?

By: Cynthia He

Many huge record companies have sued Udio and Suno for using their music to create A.I. generations.

Udio and Suno are popular A.I. music generating companies where users type in prompts to create songs. Suno was released in December 2023, while Udio came out in April 2024.

One viral song by Metro Boomin called “BBL Drizzy” uses vocals generated by Udio, which made the A.I. company famous. Suno says that it has been used by more than 10 million people to create songs.

Both companies are based on the East Coast, with Udio in New York, and Suno in Massachusetts. Both lawsuits were filed in these places.

The Recording Industry Association of America is a non-profit organization which consists of many music companies, including major groups like Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Records. The organization sued Udio and Suno for $150,000 per song.

The record companies argued that Udio and Suno used copyrighted songs to train the A.I. to generate music. Meaning, the whole company was based on using copyrighted songs. Udio and Suno both denied the accusations and said how they train the A.I. is confidential.

“Our system is explicitly designed to create music reflecting new musical ideas,” Udio said in a statement on its website.

“Suno is built for new music, new uses and new musicians. We prize originality,” said the CEO of Suno, Mikey Shulman in another statement.

Many of the songs generated by Udio and Suno are similar to real songs. In many of Jason Derulo’s released pop songs, he sings the line “Jason Derulo” at the song’s start. A generated song even has the exact words in the same rhythm. Users have also heard certain vocals in songs that sound like Mariah Carey.

More and more lawsuits against A.I. platforms are emerging — Udio and Suno are just two examples. On December 27, 2023, the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI, the two companies that created ChatGPT, for using the published articles to train the A.I. program. Getty Images also filed a lawsuit against Stability AI for similar reasons.