On Monday, June 24, major record labels Sony Music 6758.T), Universal Music Group (UMG.AS), and Warner Records (WMG.O) sued artificial intelligence companies Suno and Udio, alleging that they had committed mass copyright infringement by using the labels' recordings to train music-generating AI systems.
According to federal lawsuits filed against Udio in New York and Suno in Massachusetts, the companies duplicated music without permission to train their systems to generate music that will "directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out" the work of human artists.
In a statement, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said that their technology is transformative and designed to generate new outputs, not memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content.
The complaints said that the users of Suno and Udio have been able to replicate parts of songs, such as 'My Girl' by The Temptations, 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' by Mariah Carey, and 'I Got You (I Feel Good)' by James Brown. They have also been able to produce vocals that are "indistinguishable" from artists like Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, and ABBA.
The labels requested statutory damages from the courts, amounting to $150,000 for each song the defendants were accused of stealing. They claimed that Udio had copied 1,670 songs and Suno had copied 662.
Furthermore, the lawsuits are the first to target music-generating AI after several cases brought by authors, news outlets, and others over the alleged misuse of their work to train text-based AI models powering chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
However, AI companies have argued that their systems fairly use copyrighted material.
This year, Suno and Udio have raised millions of dollars for their AI systems, which create music in response to user text messages.
The labels complained that they have been "deliberately evasive" about the material the companies used to train their system and that disclosing it would admit willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale.
Mitch Glazier, 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."
