Two companies that provide generative music services have been sued by several major record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America.
The suits suggest the two companies, Udio and Suno, used music owned by the labels in order to “train” their generative AI models “en masse,” according to the Verge.
Both companies allow users to generate music tracks using a variety of keywords or prompts, creating tracks in a vast range of musical styles and with or without vocals and lyrics. They do so in the same way a text generator or an image generator can produce text or images through user prompts.
The use of artificial intelligence technology has prompted legislation to protect people from its misuse while also providing some companies with a healthy revenue stream, such as when Nvidia became one of the most valuable publicly traded companies last week because of its development of powerful chips.
The suits, brought by the RIAA and a group representing music labels such as the Universal Music Group, Warner Records, and Sony Music Entertainment, suggest the two companies used copyrighted music to “train” their models, feeding a wide array of styles and genres into their programs so that they would be able to mimic them. The RIAA is asking for up to $150,000 per piece used, plus other fees.
“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,” RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a press release. “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.”
AI companies have been reluctant to identify what data they use for their generative models, prompting legislation to force them to release the data and suggestions they use copyrighted material.
“These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale,” RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow said. “Suno and Udio are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and lawful footing. These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical, and lawful development of generative AI systems and to bring Suno’s and Udio’s blatant infringement to an end.”
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Suno CEO Mikey Shulman told the Verge the company’s service is designed to “generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate preexisting content,” and that users aren’t allowed to generate music using prompts that name specific artists.
Artists such as Drake and Taylor Swift have moved to remove or block AI music based on their own material. Drake called one AI track featuring a reproduction of his voice “the final straw,” though he would later use AI to replicate the voices of Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur for assistance on a “diss” track targeting fellow rapper Kendrick Lamar. The two interlocutors have been feuding since the 2010s.