Blake Britten
(Reuters) – Major record labels Sony (NYSE:) Music, Universal Music Group (AS:) and Warner Records on Monday sued artificial intelligence companies Suno and Udio, accusing them of massive copyright infringement by using the labels’ recordings to train artificial intelligence systems that generate music.
According to federal lawsuits filed against Udio in New York and Suno in Massachusetts, the companies copied music without permission to train their systems to create music that would “directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out” the work of human artists.
“Our technology is transformative; it’s designed to create entirely new experiences, not to memorize and repeat existing content,” Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said in a statement.
Representatives for Udio did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the complaints.
The complaints state that Suno and Udio users were able to recreate elements of songs including 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 could generate vocals that are “indistinguishable” from the vocals of musicians such as Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and ABBA.
The labels asked the courts to award statutory damages of up to $150,000 for the song the defendants allegedly copied. They accused Suno of copying 662 songs and Udio of copying 1,670.
The lawsuits are the first to target music-generating artificial intelligence, following several cases brought by authors, news outlets and others over the alleged misuse of their work to train artificial intelligence text models used in chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Artificial intelligence companies say their systems make fair use of copyrighted material.
Cambridge, Mass.-based Suno and New York-based Udio have raised millions of dollars this year to fund their artificial intelligence systems that create music in response to a user’s text queries.
The labels’ complaints say the companies “deliberately evaded” the material they used to teach their technology, and that disclosing it would “admit willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale.”
“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and use it for one’s own benefit without consent or payment are undermining the promise of truly innovative artificial intelligence for all of us,” Mitch Glaser, CEO of Recording. This is stated in a statement by the Industrial Association of America.