Artificial intelligence (AI) companies Suno and Udio faced legal action Monday launched by major record labels Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Records. Allegations include committing mass copyright infringement by using the labels’ recordings to train music-generating AI systems.
The New York Post reports the companies allegedly copied music without permission to teach their systems to create music that will “directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out” human artists’ work, according to federal lawsuits filed against Udio in New York and Suno in Massachusetts.
“Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content,” Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said in a statement.
Representatives for Udio did not immediately respond to requests for comment by the outlet. The Post report further set out:
The complaints said Suno and Udio users have been able to recreate elements of songs including 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 could generate vocals that are “indistinguishable” from musicians such as Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and ABBA.
The labels asked the courts to award statutory damages of up to $150,000 per song the defendants allegedly copied.
They accused Suno of copying 662 songs and Udio of copying 1,670.
Musicians around the world have described AI as a threat to creativity however Cambridge, Mass.-based Suno and New York-based Udio have raised millions in funding this year for their bespoke systems, which create music in response to user text prompts.
The labels’ complaints said the companies have been “deliberately evasive” about the material they used to train their technology, and revealing it for public scrutiny would “admit willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale.”
“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,” Mitch Glazier, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, said in a statement.
While the legal challenge and others moves forward , the CEO of one popular platform says he thinks critics are looking at it all wrong.
BandLab, a mostly free online music workstation and distribution platform based in Singapore, has more than 100 million registered users.
It recently incorporated an AI music creation tool dubbed SongStarter, which generates song ideas from genre, key, tempo and lyric prompts.
For BandLab founder and CEO Kuok Meng Ru, whose company bought music magazine NME in 2019, AI is no substitute for a real musician and he thinks critics misunderstand the process.
“It’s not called SongFinisher. It’s called SongStarter. It’s not trying to replace people’s creativity… (with) a vending machine approach of a magic button where you press and a song comes out,” Kuok said in an interview with AFP.
“You still need to use your human creativity to build on that, to turn it into something.”