Prompted to make “an Americana song in the style of Tift Merritt”, the artificial intelligence music website Udio instantly generatedIngesting massive amounts of creative labour to imitate it is not creative. That’s stealing
Suno and Udio pointed to past public statements defending their technology when asked for comment for this story. They filed their initial responses in court on Thursday, denying any copyright violations and arguing that the lawsuits were attempts to stifle smaller competitors. They compared the labels’ protests to past industry concerns about synthesisers, drum machines and other innovations replacing human musicians.
The labels’ claims echo allegations by novelists, news outlets, music publishers and others in high-profile copyright lawsuits over chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude that use generative AI to create text. Those lawsuits are still pending and in their early stages. Both sets of cases pose novel questions for the courts, including whether the law should make exceptions for AI’s use of copyrighted material to create something new.
Some claims in the AI copyright cases could hinge on comparisons between an AI system’s output and the material allegedly misused to train it, requiring the kind of analysis that has challenged judges and juries in cases about music.