By: Jason Yang

Major song companies are suing AI music generators, because they trained their models off many copyrighted songs. Udio and Suno are the companies that are being sued.

The generators allow users to type a text command, and then the generator will generate a new song based off that phrase. One of the lawsuits 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.”

Ken Doroshow, the chief legal officer of the Recording Industry Association of America, said “These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement scale. 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.”

On Udio’s website, they said that the way they trained their models was not like that. It said, “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. Our system is explicitly designed to create music reflecting new musical ideas.”

The New York Times also sued OpenAI and Microsoft because they used their articles to train their AI, ChatGPT. This situation has happened before, like Getty images suing an AI image generator.