On Monday (24 June), the three major music companies filed lawsuits against music AI start-ups Suno and Udio, alleging widespread infringement of copyrighted recordings “on an almost unimaginable scale”. Led by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the two similar lawsuits arrived four days after Advertising sign initially reported that the labels were seriously considering legal action against the two start-ups.
Filed by plaintiffs Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, the lawsuits allege that Suno and Udio illegally copied the labels' recordings to train their artificial intelligence models to produce music that could “flood the market with machine-generated content. they directly compete with, diminish and ultimately drown out the original recordings in which [the services were] built.”
Hours later, Suno's CEO Mikey Shulman responded to the lawsuit with a statement sent to Advertising sign. “Suno's mission is to make it possible for everyone to make music,” he said. “Our technology is transformative. it is designed to produce entirely new results, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content. This is why we don't allow user prompts that refer to specific artists. We would be happy to explain this to the record companies that filed this lawsuit (and actually, we tried to), but instead of entertaining a good faith discussion, they went back to their old playbook of lawyers. Suno is built for new music, new uses and new musicians. We reward originality.”
A spokesperson for the RIAA hit back at Shulman's comment, saying, “Suno continues to avoid the key question: what recordings have they illegally copied? In an apparent attempt to deceive working artists, rights holders and the media about its technology, Suno refuses to address the fact that its service has literally been caught on film – as part of the evidence in this case – doing what Mr. Shulman says the company doesn't do: memorizing and repeating art that people made. The streaming era winners worked with artists and rights holders to properly license the music. The losers did exactly what Suno and Udio are doing now.'
Udio responded on Tuesday (June 25) with a lengthy statement posted on the company Website. You can read it in full below.
Over the past couple of years, AI has become a powerful tool for creative expression in many media – from text to images to film and now music. At Udio, our mission is to empower artists of all genres to create great music. In our young life as a company, we've sat in the studios of some of the world's greatest musicians, worked on lyrics with up-and-coming songwriters, and watched as millions of users created amazing new music, from the funny to the profound.
We heard from a talented musician who, after losing the use of his hands, is now making music again. Producers have experimented with AI-generated tracks to create hit songs like 'BBL Drizzy', and everyday music fans have used the technology to express the gamut of human emotions from love to sadness to joy. Breakthrough technologies entail change and uncertainty. Let's offer some insight into how our technology works.
Generative AI models, including our music model, learn from examples. Just as students listen to music and study sheet music, our model “listened” to and learned from a large collection of recorded music.
The goal of model training is to develop an understanding of musical ideas—the basic building blocks of musical expression that belong to no one. Our system is expressly designed to create music that reflects new musical ideas. We're completely averse to playing content in our training set, and in fact we've implemented and continue to improve state-of-the-art filters to ensure our model doesn't play copyrighted works or artist voices.
We stand behind our technology and believe that genetic artificial intelligence will become a mainstay of modern society.
Almost every new technological development in music was initially greeted with trepidation, but ultimately proved to be a boon to artists, record companies, music publishers, technologists and the general public. Synthesizers, drum machines, digital recording technology, and recording itself are all examples of once-controversial music-making tools that were feared in their early days. However, each of these innovations ultimately expanded music as an art and as a business, leading to entirely new genres of music and billions of dollars in the pockets of artists, songwriters, and the record and music publishers who profit from their creations.
We know that many musicians – especially the next generation – are eager to use AI in their creative workflows. In the near future, artists will compose music together with their fans, amateur musicians will create entirely new musical genres, and talented creators – regardless of medium – will be able to rise to the top of the music industry.
The future of music will see more creative expression than ever before. Let's use this moment in technology to expand the circle of creators, empower artists and celebrate human creation
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/pro/ai-music-lawsuit-suno-udio-respond-major-labels/