Record companies sue AI music generators Suno, Udio over 'copyright infringement'

San Francisco: The biggest players in the music recording industry sued two fast growing artificial intelligence music start ups on Monday, alleging t...

San Francisco: The biggest players in the music recording industry sued two fast-growing artificial intelligence music start-ups on Monday, alleging that they used copyrighted songs to train their tools, adding to the pile of lawsuits the AI industry is already facing.

A group of record companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records, brought two suits, one against Suno and the other against Uncharted Labs, the developer of Udio. Both companies let people generate songs with simple text prompts.

"Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all,” said Mitch Glazier, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry group that Sony, UMG and Warner are all members of.

Generative AI tools like chatbots, image-generators and song-generators are built by ingesting huge amounts of human-created content. The record companies allege that Suno and Udio used songs they didn’t have the rights to when they trained their AI algorithms. Spokespeople for Udio and Suno did not return requests for comment.

As interest in AI exploded over the past year, authors, artists, graphic designers, musicians and journalists have begun pushing back against the AI industry’s use of their work to train its tech. Lawsuits have been filed against AI companies such as OpenAI by authors, comedians and newspapers.