By: Youheng Zhong

Several major record companies, including Sony Music and Warner Records, are announcing lawsuits against AI music generators Udio and Suno, claiming that the AI software steals music from creators without their consent.

Udio and Suno are AI song generators that enable users to create songs by submitting a text command to describe the creation. Similarly, AI services such as Midjourney produce images based on text prompts. However, AI doesn’t come prepackaged with knowledge; instead, it has to be trained using existing music, which means companies must feed the AI software massive amounts of data to teach it to create music. The lawsuits claim that Suno and Udio’s software steals music to “spit out” similar work and demand compensation at a hefty price: $150,000 per work.

“These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale. Suno and Udio are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and lawful footing,” said Ken Doroshow, the chief legal officer of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), in a press release on June 24th.
On the other side, Suno and Udio are defending themselves, saying that their intent wasn’t to exploit the artists and that their generated outputs were original.

Suno’s chief executive, Mikey Shulman, stated, “Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content.” He also mentioned how users could not refer to specific artists when asking Suno’s software to create something.
“Suno is built for new music, new uses, and new musicians. We prize originality.”

The lawsuits aren’t anything new though: there have already been several lawsuits from other creative industries accusing AI companies of training their software with material that belonged to them. For example, in December, The New York Times filed a suit against OpenAI and its partner Microsoft on copyright infringement of millions of articles used to train AI platforms like ChatGPT. A similar suit from eight other newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune, followed in April. Finally, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the US’s oldest nonprofit newsroom, sued OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court on Thursday for copyright infringement and similar lawsuits from other newspapers.

So, the question is, what do we value more? Human creation or AI creation? Speed or originality?
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/arts/music/record-labels-ai-lawsuit-sony-universal-warner.html?searchResultPosition=2
https://www.forbes.com/sites/virginieberger/2024/06/27/why-major-labels-are-suing-ai-music-startups-udio-and-suno-for-mass-copyright-infringement/
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/27/openai-microsoft-sued-by-center-for-investigative-reporting.html
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/major-record-labels-sue-ai-company-behind-bbl-drizzy/ar-BB1oNCF6?ocid=BingNewsSerp
Record Companies Bring Landmark Cases for Responsible AI Against Suno and Udio in Boston and New York Federal Courts, Respectively – RIAA