“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,” said Mitch Glazier, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, an industry group that includes Sony, UMG and Warner.
Generative AI tools, such as chatbots, image generators and song generators, are built by ingesting vast amounts of human-created content. The record companies allege that Suno and Udio used music they didn't own to train their AI algorithms. Spokespeople for Udio and Suno did not respond to requests for comment.
Get caught up in
Stories to keep you up to date
As interest in AI has exploded over the past year, authors, artists, graphic designers, musicians and journalists have begun to push back against the AI industry's use of their work to train the technology. Authors, comedians and newspapers have filed lawsuits against AI companies such as OpenAI.
AI leaders generally say that using books, news articles, artwork and other materials to train AI constitutes “fair use,” a concept in copyright law that allows works to be reused with significant modifications. But many creators disagree, arguing that their work is being stolen and used to train tools that will replace them.
Suno and Udio let you generate an entire song by entering a description, including the desired genre, lyrics, and the type of instruments used. Suno blocks requests to generate songs that imitate specific artists; in tests done by The Washington Post, a request to create a “Dolly Parton-esque” song resulted in an error message saying it couldn't be generated when prompted for the artist's name. Udio doesn't seem to have the same limitations, and will quickly generate a plaintive country song with lyrics sung in a Parton-like voice upon input. Same prompt.
Some musicians are also calling for new laws that would specifically protect their likeness and musical style. In Tennessee, home to the music industry in Nashville, lawmakers amended an old law earlier this year to specifically ban imitating musicians' voices without their permission. A bipartisan group of U.S. senators proposed similar nationwide legislation last year.
