SAN FRANCISCO — The biggest players in the music recording industry sued two fast-growing artificial intelligence music start-ups 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, UMG Recordings and Warner Records, brought two suits, one against Suno and the other against Uncharted Labs, the owner 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.