Major record labels have sued two artificial intelligence companies for allegedly stealing copyrighted sound recordings to generate music.
Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and other music giants have filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Suno and Udio, the Recording Industry Association of America announced Monday.
The complaints against the two tech companies allege that they scraped material from copyrighted songs spanning various artists, genres and time periods to train their generative AI models.
The music community has embraced AI, and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to create sustainable AI tools centered around human creativity that put artists and songwriters in the driver’s seat,” RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement.
But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it's fair game to copy an artist's work and exploit it for your own gain without consent or compensation undermine the promise of truly innovative AI for us all .
Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said in a statement provided to the Times that the company's mission is to empower everyone to make music.
Our technology is transformative; it's designed to generate completely new results, not memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content, he said.
This is why we do not allow users to reference specific artists. We would have been happy to explain this to the record labels who filed this lawsuit (and in fact, we tried to), but instead of engaging in a good faith discussion, they reverted to their old lawyer-led working method.
Udio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit against Suno was filed in Massachusetts, while the complaint against Udio was filed in New York.
Among the copyrighted songs allegedly exploited by the AI programs were Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You, Jerry Lee Lewis' Great Balls of Fire, the Beach Boys' I Get Around, ABBA's Dancing Queen, James Brown's I Got You (I Feel Good), Michael Bubl's Sway, Green Days' American Idiot, the Temptations' My Girl and Michael Jackson's Billie Jean.
The record labels are demanding that Suno and Udio admit to exploiting their music libraries without permission and asking the courts to bar artificial intelligence companies from stealing their copyrighted material in the future. The plaintiffs also seek damages for copyright infringement.
The lawsuits were launched about a month after Sony Music sent letters to 700 artificial intelligence developers warning them not to use its artists' music to train their models. The New York-based music company said in a statement that it endorses artists and songwriters who take the initiative to adopt new technologies to support their art while committing to protecting their work from thieves of AI.
Some musicians have started to use AI as a tool. In May, indie pop artist Washed Out released an AI-generated music video for his song The Hardest Part. The Georgia-based singer-songwriter, whose real name is Ernest Greene, used OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video technology to make the video.
(Los Angeles Times writer Wendy Lee contributed to this report.)
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