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The war between AI companies and the industries they steal from rages on. AI companies are no strangers to scraping content from actual creators without their consent, and the entities supporting the creators are striking back. Two music generators (Udio and Suno) are facing a lawsuit from top music labels.
As with anything dealing with the law, things are moving slowly. Right now, The New York Times is still in the process of suing OpenAI and Microsoft for lifting copyrighted material from the site. This lawsuit has been going on for several months, and we’re still waiting for the result.
AI has been dragging a knife through several industries like writing and art, and it has its sights set on the film industry. Well, the music industry is not immune to the blade. We’ve seen examples of AI-generated music making headlines. It’s, obviously, a huge smack to the face of anyone who’s made actual music.
Two music generators are being sued by top music labels
The two music generators in question are Suno and Udio. Several top music labels are now suing these companies for their AI music-generating tools. The Recording Industry Association of America announced this lawsuit on Monday.
The labels involved in the lawsuit are Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records. The lawsuit is asking for a hefty amount of money in compensation. As per the report, it’s asking for $150,000 for each stolen work. That’s a tab that can wrack up quickly depending on how many tracks were lifted.
The lawsuit claims that the tools “spit out” similar works. That’s pretty much how most mainstream AI tools work. Mikey Shulman, Suno AI’s chief executive said that the technology is “designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorise and regurgitate pre-existing content…but instead of entertaining a good faith discussion, they’ve reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook,” Shulman continued.
However, if this tool is creating “completely new works,” then there wouldn’t be a lawsuit, would there? Companies need to stop trying to convince people that their tools create completely new works. We’ve seen so many examples of tools making content extremely reminiscent of existing works. We’ve seen it from music to art to journalism.
We’re going to have to wait for the outcome of this lawsuit. There’s no telling when to expect the results from the case.