Top record labels in the music industry have sued two AI startups namely Suno and Udio while accusing them of committing copyright infringement on an ‘almost unimaginable scale’ by creating AI tools which can generate music tracks based on a user’s prompt within seconds. The plaintiffs, namely, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Atlantic Records, Warner Bros, Capitol Records, and a few others, filed two separate complaints against the aforementioned in federal courts in New York and Massachusetts on June 24.
The lawsuits announced by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) seek $150,000 (Rs 1,25,17,980) for each track whose copyright was allegedly infringed upon by Suno and Udio.
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What Allegations Have Been Made In These Lawsuits?
The lawsuits claim that Suno and Udio extracted a large number of sound recordings from digital sources, including copyrighted ones. These recordings were allegedly incorporated into the training datasets for their generative AI models, which underpin their services.
To verify that the AI-generated outputs were produced by copying and using copyrighted recordings, the lawsuits mention a test. This test involved using targeted prompts with specific characteristics of popular songs, which led the AI music generator tools to create music files that closely resembled the copyrighted recordings.
As per the lawsuit, both AI companies have undergone ‘overfitting’. It read, “An AI model is “overfitted” when it is too closely adapted to the data on which it was trained, making it difficult for the model to generalise to new data sets.”
The lawsuit against Suno reads that one of the AI startup’s early investors inadvertently accepted that copyrighted music was used to train the model. The investor also said that he expected for Suno to be sued by copyright owners and that it was “the risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company.”
The music labels further accused that they were able to prompt these AI models to produce outputs which resembled popular songs by famous artists such as Mariah Carey, ABBA, Green Day, and more. They also presented a side-by-side comparison of the musical scores of both versions to strengthen their case.
Udio in response said, “completely uninterested in reproducing content. We stand behind our technology and believe that generative AI will become a mainstay of modern society.” It added that it continues to refine its filters to avoid reproducing copyrighted works or artists’ voices.