By: Nina He

A few days ago, major record companies like Sony, Universal, and Warner sued two digital music generation companies. They were accused of using copyrighted music to “train” the A.I. that powers their companies.

The companies—Suno and Udio—allow users to insert a text command, and then the company will generate a song using A.I.

However, the major record companies said that the only reason that’s possible for these companies is because they’re using their copyrighted music to train on reams of intellectual property that the plaintiffs own.

“The foundation of its business has been to exploit copyrighted sound recordings without permission,” said a lawsuit filed against the companies.

“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,” another said. “For Udio specifically, this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings.”

For Suno, it was accused of using tracks related to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone,” while Udio was accused of using ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”

In its defense, Udio said this on its website: “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 said in an email that “our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content” and that Suno prizes “originality.”