Major record labels sue AI Music Generators alleging

TThe 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 easier for people to generate music based on existing songs.

The Recording Industry Association of America said it filed dual 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 Udio AI. The complaints allege that the companies are illegally training their AI models on large quantities of copyrighted sound recordings.

The RIAA, a record trade group, is seeking damages of up to $150,000 “per work infringed.” This could potentially amount to billions of dollars.

“The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable human-creativity-centric AI tools that put artists and songwriters in the driver’s seat,” RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement. . . “But we can only be successful if developers are willing to work with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it is ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for your own profit without consent or payment delay the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”

Suno and Udio are among a new crop of startups using generative AI to automate the music creation process. People can type in a short written prompt, like “an electro-pop song about strawberries,” and either company’s software will output human-sounding music within seconds. To build their AI systems, companies must first train their software on huge data sets, which can be made up of many millions of individual pieces of information.

Suno’s technology is “transformative” and “designed to generate completely new results, 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 musical artist names in their written instructions when creating songs, he explained.

“We would have been happy to explain this to the corporate record companies who filed this lawsuit (and, in fact, we tried to do so), but instead of nurturing a good faith discussion, they reverted to the old lawyer-led playbook. ,” he said.

Udio did not respond to a request for comment.

Founded in 2022, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Suno first launched its music creation software last year and raised $125 million in May. Udio, founded by former Google DeepMind researchers and engineers and based in New York, launched a “beta” version of its software in April and raised $10 million in funding. Both allow users to create some music for free, while also offering monthly subscriptions for those who want to create more.

The music industry’s legal challenge is just the latest example of technology colliding with the creative industries, as generative AI is increasingly used to produce all types of content. Companies like Midjourney, OpenAI, and Stability AI have built their media generation AI models with datasets that pull images from across the internet. Although they argue that the practice is protected by the fair use doctrine of US copyright law, it has sparked outrage and lawsuits.

See more information: How AI is transforming music

In the music industry, artists and record labels see AI as a potential existential threat. Hundreds of musicians, including Billie Eilish, Miranda Lambert and Aerosmith, signed an open letter in April through the nonprofit Artist Rights Alliance, urging AI developers, technology companies and others to stop using AI “to infringe and devalue the rights of human artists.” .” At the same time, record labels are struggling to balance the creative potential of rapidly evolving technology while protecting artists’ rights and their own profits.

“There are promises and dangers with AI,” according to the complaint against Udio. “As more powerful and sophisticated AI tools emerge, AI’s ability to integrate into music creation, production and distribution processes grows. If developed with the permission and participation of copyright owners, generative AI tools will be able to help humans create and produce new and innovative music.”

But these same tools, if not implemented responsibly, also risk creating “irreparable harm” to artists, publishers and the industry, “inevitably reducing the quality of new music available to consumers and diminishing our shared culture.” .

Neither Suno nor Udio said exactly what their AI systems are trained on when asked by Bloomberg News in April. Udio co-founder and CEO David Ding said the company used publicly available data on the Internet.

“We try to cast our net as wide as possible so that we can represent all different musical traditions in our model,” Ding said at the time.

Shulman said in April that training data is, in some ways, even more important than how the company builds its AI software, “so we’re guarding that secret very carefully.” Shulman also said Suno’s practices are “legal” and “fairly in line with what other people are doing.”

Remarkably similar

Music generated using the Services may sometimes sound remarkably similar to copyrighted music. Ed Newton-Rex, CEO of the nonprofit Fairly Trained, which provides certification for AI models trained on licensed data, said he found it easy to generate a series of songs using both companies‘software that looks a lot like artists like Queen, Abba, Oasis, Blink-182 and Ed Sheeran.

In Monday’s filings, the RIAA claims that authentic producer tags appear on some of the music coming out of Suno and Udio, and that people using the services have generated sounds very similar to countless songs made by artists including The Temptations ‘ my girlGreen Day American idiot and Mariah Carey Everything I want for Christmas. They also produced vocals indistinguishable from famous artists including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson, according to the RIAA.

Shulman said Suno was thinking about how to eventually compensate musical artists for their work, but that “right now there is no good way to do it.”

“We work closely with lawyers to ensure what we are doing is legal and industry standard,” he said in April. “If the law changes, we would obviously change our business one way or another.”

The music industry aims to get ahead of technology before it’s too late and has already warned AI startups.

See more information: AI is wreaking havoc on Taylor Swift and Drake’s fan bases

UMG’s music publishing arm sued Anthropic, a generative AI company, in October over similar allegations, focused in particular on alleged copying of lyrics. In May, Sony Music sent a letter to more than 700 AI companies and streaming services warning them not to use the label’s copyrighted material without explicit permission and licensing. He said he had reason to believe that his content had already been used to train, develop or commercialize AI systems without his permission.

The RIAA alleges that Suno and Udio, whether through an investor or internal executives, essentially admitted to using copyrighted material to develop their models.

One of Suno’s early investors said he probably wouldn’t have invested in the startup if it had record deals when it started, according to the complaint. He said defending against lawsuits was a necessary risk.

Generative AI companies have plausible fair use defenses for using works as training data, said Pamela Samuelson, a digital copyright expert and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. But she said courts may look at music differently than other works, such as computer code, text or images.

“The type of data can really matter,” Samuelson said. “I could see the courts differentiating based on that.”

The case against Suno was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and the case against Uncharted Labs was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.