The world’s biggest record labels are suing two artificial intelligence startups, taking an aggressive stance to protect their intellectual property against technology that makes it easy for people to generate music based on existing songs.
Major Record Labels Sue AI Music Generators
The Recording Industry Association of America said it filed twin lawsuits Monday against Suno AI and Uncharted Labs Inc., the developer of Udio AI, on behalf of Universal Music Group NV, Warner Music Group Corp. and Sony Music Entertainment. The complaints allege the companies are unlawfully training their AI models on massive amounts of copyrighted sound recordings.
The RIAA, a trade group for record labels, is seeking damages of as much as $150,000 “per work infringed.” That could amount to potentially billions of dollars.
“The music community has embraced AI, and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” Mitch Glazier, chief executive officer of the RIAA, said in a statement. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”
Suno and Udio are among a new crop of startups that use generative AI to automate the music-making process. People can type in a short written prompt, like “an electro-pop song about strawberries,” and software from either company will spit out human-sounding music in seconds. In order to build their AI systems, the companies must first train their software on enormous datasets, which can be made up of many millions of individual pieces of information.
Suno’s technology is “transformative,” and is “designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content,” co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman said in a statement. That’s why the company doesn’t allow users to include the names of musical artists in their written prompts when creating songs, he explained.
Time
