By Blake Britten
(Reuters) – Record giants Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Records on Monday sued artificial intelligence companies Snow and Vudio, alleging mass copyright infringement by using the companies' recordings to train music-generating AI systems.
A federal lawsuit filed against Udio of New York and Suno of Massachusetts alleges that the companies copied music without permission and trained their systems to create music that “directly competes with, devalues and ultimately drowns out” the work of human artists.
“Our technology is transformative, designed to generate entirely new output rather than memorizing and repeating existing content,” Suno CEO Mikey Schulman said in a statement.
A Udio spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaints.
According to the complaint, Suno and Udio users were able to recreate elements of songs like 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 produce vocals that were “indistinguishable” from musicians like Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and ABBA.
The record companies have asked the court to award them statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each song that the defendants allegedly copied. They allege that Suno copied 662 songs and Udio copied 1,670 songs.
The lawsuit is the first to target generative music AI, following several brought by authors, media outlets and others who claim their research was misused to train text-based AI models that power chatbots, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. The AI companies argue that their systems make fair use of copyrighted material.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Suno and New York-based Udio raised millions of dollars in funding this year for their AI systems that create music in response to users' text prompts.
The record companies' complaint said the companies have “deliberately been misleading” about the materials they used to train their technology, and that disclosing this “would be an admission of willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale.”
“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio claim it's 'fair' to copy an artist's lifetime work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or compensation, undermining the promise of truly transformative AI for us all,” Recording Industry Association of America CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement.
(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by David Vario and David Gregorio)
