Artificial Intelligence companies Suno and Udio have been sued by major record labels like Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Records for copyright infringement alleging that their recordings were used to train music generating application systems according to a report by Reuters.
Suno and Udio are GenAI music applications designed to generate songs that either combine vocals and instruments or are purely instrumental by using text prompts.
According to the federal lawsuits filed against Udio and Suno by the record labels as stated in the report, the AI companies have been accused of copying their recordings without permission to teach their systems to create music that will “Directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out” human artist’s work. The labels further avowed that AI companies were “deliberately evasive” about the material they used to train their technology revealing it would “admit willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale,” the report noted.
Other complaints reportedly include the recreation of elements of songs by users such as The Temptations’ My Girl,” Mariah Carrey’s “All I want for Christmas Is You,” and James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good),” and vocals that are “indistinguishable” from the musicians such as Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and ABBA.
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However, the AI companies have denied such claims and argued that their system makes fair use of copyrighted material.
Talking about the entire episode as per the report by Reuters, Mitch Glazer, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America said, “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.”
The allegation comes at a time when the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Suno and New York- based Udio have raised millions in funding for this year for their AI systems.
Responding to the lawsuit as put forth by the Reuters, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said, “Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, and not to memorise and regurgitate pre-existing content.”
However, the spokespeople for Udio did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaints.
The laws suits are the first of its kind to target music generating AI following several cases filed by authors, news outlets and others for misusing their works to train text-based AI models powering chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The labels demanded the courts to award statutory damages of upto $150,000 per song the defendant allegedly copied. They also accused Suno of copying 662 songs and Udio of copying 1,670 songs.
