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Major record companies, including the Sony, Universal and Warner conglomerates, sued two digital music generation companies on Monday, accusing them of using copyrighted sounds and songs to train the artificial intelligence that powers their businesses.<\/p>\n
The two companies being sued, Udio and Suno, allow users to create songs almost instantly by submitting a text command, much like how A.I. services such as Midjourney produce images based on text prompts.<\/p>\n
The power of artificial intelligence is upending numerous industries, and companies that are able to take advantage of the technology can financially benefit. But the music industry plaintiffs argued in their lawsuits that the songs produced by these A.I. companies were possible only because the systems were trained on reams of intellectual property that the plaintiffs own.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe foundation of its business has been to exploit copyrighted sound recordings without permission,\u201d said the lawsuits filed against Udio and Suno in federal court.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cBuilding and operating a service like Udio\u2019s requires at the outset copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to \u2018train\u2019 a software \u2018model\u2019 to generate outputs,\u201d one suit said. \u201cFor Udio specifically, this process involved copying decades worth of the world\u2019s most popular sound recordings.\u201d<\/p>\n
The suits are asking the courts to declare that the companies have engaged in copyright infringement and to assign damages.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale,\u201d Ken Doroshow, the chief legal officer of the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade organization, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Doroshow added, \u201cThese lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical and lawful development of generative A.I. systems.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement on its website, Udio denied that its software training methods were untoward.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust as students listen to music and study scores, our model has \u2018listened\u2019 to and learned from a large collection of recorded music,\u201d it said. \u201cThe goal of model training is to develop an understanding of musical ideas \u2014 the basic building blocks of musical expression that are owned by no one. Our system is explicitly designed to create music reflecting new musical ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In an emailed statement, Suno\u2019s chief executive, Mikey Shulman, defended his company.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content,\u201d Shulman said, adding that users cannot refer to specific artists when asking Suno\u2019s software to create something.<\/p>\n
\u201cSuno is built for new music, new uses and new musicians,\u201d Shulman said. \u201cWe prize originality.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new lawsuits echo earlier ones from creative industries that accuse A.I. companies of training their lucrative systems with material that belongs to someone else.<\/p>\n
The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI<\/a>, the maker of ChatGPT, saying that millions of the newspaper\u2019s articles were used to train A.I. platforms. The photography syndicate Getty Images used similar reasoning in a lawsuit against Stability AI.<\/p>\n The actress and comedian Sarah Silverman<\/a> and a group of novelists, including Jonathan Franzen and John Grisham<\/a>, have filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI, accusing the company of training its systems with their work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n