The music industry has officially declared war on two of the most prominent AI-generated music tools, Suno and Udio. A group of music labels, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Group, filed a lawsuit in US federal court on Monday morning alleging “massive” copyright infringement.
The plaintiffs are seeking damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work. The lawsuit against Suno was filed in Massachusetts, while the lawsuit against Udio's parent company, Uncharted Inc., was filed in New York. Suno and Udio did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“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, stymieing the truly transformative promise of AI for us all,” Mitch Glazier, president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, said in a press release.
The companies haven't disclosed what they trained their generators on. Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI executive who now runs the ethical AI nonprofit Fairy Training, has written extensively about his experiments with Suno and Udio, in which Newton-Rex found they could generate music that was “strikingly similar to copyrighted songs.” In the lawsuit, the music labels say they were able to get Suno to independently generate output that “matched” copyrighted works from a range of artists, from ABBA to Jason Derulo.
One example presented in the lawsuit describes how the label used prompts such as “1950s rock and roll, rhythm and blues, 12-bar blues, rockabilly, energetic male vocalist, singer-guitarist” and snippets of song lyrics to create songs with Suno that closely resemble Chuck Berry's 1958 rock hit “Johnny B. Goode.” One song almost exactly replicates the chorus of “Go, Johnny, go,” and the plaintiffs, who attached a juxtaposition transcription of the sheet music, argued that such duplication was only possible because Suno had trained on copyrighted works.
Udio's lawsuit gives similar examples, alleging that the label was able to produce 12 songs that were similar to Mariah Carey's everlasting hit, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” and provides side-by-side comparisons of the music and lyrics, pointing out that a Mariah Carey soundalike produced by Udio has already garnered public attention.
RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow said Suno and Udio were trying to hide “the full extent of the infringement.” When questioned in pre-litigation communications, the AI companies did not deny using copyrighted material in their training data, and instead said the training data was “confidential business information,” according to the complaint against Suno.
“Our technology is innovative – it's designed to generate entirely new output rather than memorize and repeat existing content, which is why we don't allow user prompts that reference specific artists,” Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said in a statement. “We would have been happy to explain this to the record companies who filed suit (in fact, we tried to explain it to them), but instead of having discussions in good faith, they reverted to their old lawyer-driven ways.”