The music industry has officially declared war on Suno and Udio, two of the most prominent AI music generators. A group of music labels including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group has filed lawsuits in US federal court on Monday morning alleging copyright infringement on a “massive scale.”
The plaintiffs seek damages up to $150,000 per work infringed. The lawsuit against Suno is filed in Massachusetts, while the case against Udio’s parent company Uncharted Inc. was filed in New York. Suno and Udio did not immediately respond to a request to comment.
“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,” Recording Industry Association of America chair and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a press release.
AI isn’t “like a person” it doesn’t “learn like a person” it doesn’t “think like a person” it’s nothing like a person. It’s a a machine that creates copies of whatever you put into it. It’s a machine that a real person, or group of people, own. These people TAKE all the stuff everyone else created and put it into their copy machine.
In fact it’s really easy to show that it’s a copy machine because the less stuff you put into it the more of a direct copy you get out of it. If you put only one song, or one artist, into it then virtually everything it creates would be direct copyright infringements. If you put all of the worlds music into it the copying becomes more blurred, more complex, more interesting, and therefore more valuable.
Sure AI is a great innovation, but if someone wants to put my work into a copying machine they’re going to have to acquire it from me legally.
No one is against AI, we’re just against the people who own the AI machines stealing our work without paying for it.