The US record labels have sued Suno and Udio
Suno: What data does artificial intelligence tell us about the creation of a fake Drake song? The Suno lawsuit and the Udio lawsuit
Artists and labels have been fighting against companies that they say copied their work over the course of a year since a fake Drake song was created using artificial intelligence. Some artificial intelligence systems are able to recreate recordings that sound like them, raising questions about how much control the player has over the system.
In an email, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman says that the technology the company uses is designed to provide completely new outputs, not to memorize previous content. The user prompt isn’t based on specific artists according to Shulman.
We would have been happy to explain it to the corporate record labels that filed this lawsuit, but instead of engaging in a good faith discussion, they reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook. Suno is built for new music, new uses, and new musicians. We prize originality,” the statement reads.
Suno executives and investors acknowledged the possibility of being sued in a Rolling Stone profile on the company this March. Antonio Rodriguez is an early investor in Suno and told the magazine that he probably wouldn’t have invested in it if there had been deals with labels. I think that they NEEDED to make this product without constraints.
What data is used to train models is a subject that has been kept under wraps. OpenAI is being sued by authors and news publishers because they say their works were included in training data. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has repeatedly dodged questions about whether Sora, the company’s AI video generator, was trained on YouTube content.
“Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content. Suno does not allow user prompt that refer to specific artists. We would have been happy to let the corporate record labels know that we were present, but instead they have just reverted to their old lawyer-led approach.
The Udio lawsuit points to the fact that the labels were able to create 12 different outputs of the song, similar to the one hit by Mariah Carey. It also offers a side-by-side comparison of music and lyrics, and notes that Mariah Carey soundalikes generated by Udio have already caught the attention of the public.
