Artificial intelligence (AI) companies Suno and Udio were sued on Monday by major record labels Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Records, alleging they committed mass copyright infringement by using the labels’ recordings to train their music-generating AI systems.
of New York Post Reports A federal lawsuit filed against Udio of New York and Suno of Massachusetts alleges the companies copied music without permission and trained their systems to create music that “directly competes with, devalues, and ultimately drowns out the works of human artists.”
“Our technology is transformative – it’s designed to generate entirely new output rather than memorizing and repeating existing content,” Sno CEO Mikey Schulman said in a statement.
A representative for Udio did not immediately respond to the media’s request for comment. post The report further states:
According to the complaint, Suno and Udio users were able to recreate elements of songs like the Temptations’ “My Girl,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good),” and produce vocals that were “indistinguishable” from musicians like Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and ABBA.
The record companies asked the court to award statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each song the defendants allegedly copied.
They accused Suno of copying 662 songs and Udio of copying 1,670 songs.
While musicians around the world describe AI as a threat to their creativity, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Suno and New York-based Udio raised millions of dollars in funding this year for a bespoke system that creates music in response to users’ text prompts.
The record companies’ complaint said the companies have “knowingly been misleading” about the materials they used to train their craft, and that opening it up to public scrutiny “would amount to admitting willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale.”
“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s lifetime work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or compensation, undermining the promise of truly transformative AI for us all,” Recording Industry Association of America CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement.
As legal challenges and other litigation move forward, the CEO of one popular platform says he thinks critics have it all wrong.
Streaming music giant Spotify has taken action against AI music startup Boomy, removing tens of thousands of songs from its platform amid growing concerns about streaming fraud and confusion. https://t.co/UA5xVZIdoD
—Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) May 11, 2023
Singapore-based BandLab, a mostly free online music workstation and distribution platform, has more than 100 million registered users.
The company recently introduced an AI music creation tool called SongStarter, which generates song ideas from prompts for genre, key, tempo and lyrics.
Kwok-Meng Lu, founder and CEO of BandLab, which acquired music magazine NME in 2019, believes AI is no substitute for real musicians and that critics have misunderstood the process.
“This is a song starter, not a song finisher. We’re not trying to replace people’s creativity with a magic vending machine approach where you press a button and a song comes out,” Kwok told AFP in an interview.
“We need to use human creativity to develop it further and turn it into something.”
