The Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) is suing two AI music generation companies, Suno and Udio, for training their AIs on unlicensed music created by top artists.The RIAA filed the suits in Massachusetts and New York on behalf of Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group, the industry’s “Big Three,” Reuters reports.Suno and Udio can create music, lyrics, and vocals in a matter of minutes based on a text prompt. Suno is also currently available via Microsoft Copilot.”These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale. Suno and Udio are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and lawful footing,” RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow said in a statement.The RIAA alleges that some songs sound too much like existing popular music. It says Udio’s generator has songs with strong resemblances to “I Get Around” from The Beach Boys and Abba’s “Dancing Queen,” while Suno has created tracks that include portions of songs like Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”“Because of their sheer popularity and exposure, the Copyrighted Recordings had to be included within Suno’s training data for Suno’s model to be successful at creating the desired human-sounding outputs,” the suit says.The RIAA wants $150,000 per infringing song. When it approached Suno and Udio about the potential infringement, both companies claimed that details were “confidential business information.” Several AI companies have argued that using data to train their AI models constitutes fair use rather than a copyright violation.The RIAA disagrees. In a statement, RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier 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.”
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Suno CEO Mickey Shulman tells Reuters that the company’s technology is designed “to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content.”Despite the suit, the music industry isn’t wholeheartedly against AI. Last year, Grammy CEO and and President Harvey Mason Jr. said that “AI, or music that contains AI-created elements, is absolutely eligible for entry and for consideration for Grammy”—as long as there are human-generated elements.Warner Music Nashville also released “Where That Came From” earlier this year with AI-generated vocals from Randy Travis, who lost his ability to sing after a stroke a decade ago. And in November, The Beatles released their last new tune, “Now And Then,” which was developed with the help of an AI program.
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