Music labels' AI lawsuits create copyright puzzle for courts
Technology
Music labels' AI lawsuits create copyright puzzle for courts
(Reuters) - Country musician Tift Merritt's most popular song on Spotify, "Traveling Alone,", opens new tab is a ballad with lyrics evoking solitude and the open road.
Prompted by Reuters to make "an Americana song in the style of Tift Merritt," the artificial intelligence music website Udio instantly generated "Holy Grounds,", opens new tab a ballad with lyrics about "driving old backroads" while "watching the fields and skies shift and sway."
Merritt, a Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter, told Reuters that the "imitation" Udio created "doesn't make the cut for any album of mine."
"This is a great demonstration of the extent to which this technology is not transformative at all," Merritt said. "It's stealing."
Merritt, who is a longtime artists' rights advocate, isn't the only musician sounding alarms. In April, she joined Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder and dozens of other artists in an open letter warning that AI-generated music trained on their recordings could "sabotage creativity" and sideline human artists.
The big record labels are worried too. Sony Music (6758.T), opens new tab, Universal Music Group (UMG.AS), opens new tab and Warner Music (WMG.O), opens new tab sued Udio and another music AI company called Suno in June, marking the music industry's entrance into high-stakes copyright battles over AI-generated content that are just starting to make their way through the courts.
"Ingesting massive amounts of creative labor to imitate it is not creative," said Merritt, an independent musician whose first record label is now owned by UMG, but who said she is not financially involved with the company. "That's stealing in order to be competition and replace us."
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 synthesizers, drum machines and other innovations replacing human musicians.
