he world’s biggest record labels are suing two artificial intelligence startups, taking an aggressive stance to protect their intellectual property against technology that makes it easy for people to generate music based on existing songs.
Suno and Udio are among a new crop of startups that use generative AI to automate the music-making process. People can type in a short written prompt, like “an electro-pop song about strawberries,” and software from either company will spit out human-sounding music in seconds. In order to build their AI systems, the companies must first train their software on enormous datasets, which can be made up of many millions of individual pieces of information.
“There is both promise and peril with AI,” according to the complaint against Udio. “As more powerful and sophisticated AI tools emerge, the ability for AI to weave itself into the processes of music creation, production, and distribution grows. If developed with the permission and participation of copyright owners, generative AI tools will be able to assist humans in creating and producing new and innovative music.
Shulman said in April that the training data is, in some ways, even more important than how the company constructs its AI software, “so we’re pretty closely guarding that secret.” Shulman also said Suno’s practices are “legal” and “fairly in line with what other people are doing.”Music generated with the services can, at times, sound remarkably similar to copyrighted music.